


Shore Lucky

by voicemails



Category: EXO (Band), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Complete, Fluff and Angst, Light Angst, M/M, Slow Build, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 03:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 54,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15283014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voicemails/pseuds/voicemails
Summary: Chanyeol hasn’t piloted a jaeger in years, but when his best friend gets grounded, he has to face his destiny – again. Pacific Rim AU.





	Shore Lucky

**Author's Note:**

> TW - Major Character Death, Graphic Violence
> 
> I wrote most of this back in 2014, before Kris and Luhan left; yes, even the Kris parts were written before that. I easily was able to write Luhan out but not Kris. By the time Tao left it was too far along to change the basis of it (I was about 25k deep then). Then I went off to uni and forgot about this for a long time...I guess this fic is sort of a memorial to once was in that manner, back in that time. I can't believe it's 2018. I posted half of this fic ("Part 1") about a year ago, then deleted it when I had the renewed energy to finish it. Also, please let me know if I'm tagging all this right.
> 
> I’m going to explicitly state the Wufan scenes aren’t relating to anything – I wrote them in early 2014, they just came to be a little too real. I guess. That’s also why I feel like some of the characterizations are a bit dated. Same with the fact that I don’t think this lines up 100% with the universe as presented in Uprising, but I wrote most of this with specific outlines that I feel like changing now could alter the story too much.

**Part 1**

 

 

 

> _There's a flash of blinding white light. They ask him his name, but he can't respond, he can't hear. His ears burst, and the silence washes over him again, and all he can feel himself saying is...nothingness...for miles...for years..._

“Do you want to pilot again, Chanyeol?”

Change can happen in a matter of seconds; on days like today, Chanyeol has a hard time telling past from present because of it. He's in Marshall Kwon's main office, a tight, circular room located near the top of the Hong Kong base. When he looks to the sliding doors that lead to her small balcony, all he sees are grey skies and the horizon blurring in a downpour.

Rainy season in Hong Kong: the tell-tale sign of summer.

It was summer, over a decade ago, when the first kaiju landed in San Francisco; it was summer, eight years ago, when Shore Lucky first dropped; and it was summer, three years ago, when the light blinded him. Some days he feels like he's just waking up from the last drop, as if no time has passed. When he closes his eyes he still sees the shadows of the ocean, tempest and all, like it's happening in this very moment, the world just waiting for Chanyeol to wake up. The wet air, fat rain drops landing on the roof, all promising of the way May will soon break to June, and then June to July, and then another year will have passed and Chanyeol is all the same for it.

“Do you?” Marshall Kwon repeats, looking at him with an aspect that is half concern, half frustration. Chanyeol isn't necessarily spacey – no, that's Yixing's job – but Kwon has known him long enough to know when he is drifting off. And drifting he is.

It's strange – he doesn't know anymore. When it first ended, all he could think about was how much he never wanted to step foot in a jaeger again; he even thought of leaving the program entirely, going off like the other ex-pilots. Yet he knew, even then, he could never do what Wu did – make a name for himself, find a life outside of Pan Pacific Defense Force - because he had been inside the base for as long as he could remember. Yura, his sister, got out, but she had never really been in. While he had been learning to program and sneaking into the command center, she studied quietly in her room. She's a news reporter now, famous on a local scale, happy and well-to-do. He's a bit envious of how she never got swept up in it, and on lonely nights he thinks of just going off like she once did and playing drums inside some midwestern music bar in the states, somewhere as far from water and kaijus as possible.

Deep down inside, he knows he can't do it. The programming language is his mother tongue and the silence still rings inside of him so strongly that no amount of bass could ever drown it out. His life is here, decided from birth, and locked in with all that had passed. It's too late to turn back.

A jaeger is something else entirely, though – a death trap, a huge, roaring machine that he had once piloted without ease. Maneuvering the jaeger was not his first skill; drifting, for some reason, was, and ever since Baekhyun had left, his limbs have returned to their natural state: one where his motor cortex can not control them. In all truth, he knows he was never as good as Minseok or Sehun, simply because his body was not made for it – but that doesn't mean he couldn't be close, and close he was, all those years ago. 

Baekhyun's body wasn't made for the jaeger either, but something had clicked between them that made grace appear when they were together. That's the drift for you. 

Piloting was not something he was born to do but neither is programming, nor is jaeger mechanics, and look where he is now. Though the silence is still so loud, the thrill of success was once just as deafening, if not moreso. His legs still know the feeling of dropping into the open water and charging forward, his arms locking with some kind of muscle memory of how to throw a perfect sucker punch. He misses all of it – most of all, Baekhyun, but everything else as well. Those who came before him. Those who have come after.

“I don't know,” he sighs, anticlimactically. Noncommittal; unbecoming of 18-year-old Chanyeol, but characteristic of 24-year-old Chanyeol. Marshall Kwon smiles back, sadly, warmly. He knows that she isn't sure if she wanted him to say yes or no - it's a gut reaction, all these years here. Torn between being the leader that needs more pilots as soon as possible, and the sister that watched Chanyeol fall onto the shore of Hong Kong with blood trickling down his face, making such decisions would never be easy. She knows what happens to pilots. He knows what happens to pilots.

They both know what happens without pilots.

“Not now,” she says. She turns in her chair to face the monitors that line her walls. Chanyeol is still looking out the window. He can only hear the faintest buzz of the rain hitting the metal walls of the base, but he knows it's out there. “But please, answer me soon.”

“I will.”

Chanyeol stands, bows, and exits without another word.

* * *

On these very days, when past blurs to present, Chanyeol forgets that the Hong Kong base isn't just some weird dormitory, but rather, a well oiled machine of thousands of cogs, technicians and pilots and officers and cafeteria workers, all working together for a common goal. Sometimes he feels like he's in high school, when Krystal walks by and winks at him and Jongdae slaps his ass in the cafeteria line. He never really got high school; the academy was the closest thing he had to schooling, and even then it wasn't the same, the competitiveness stopping the experience short of nostalgic, the trainings more grueling than any math test.

It's still the base, though, not a school, not even like the academy. The walls are sterile cement, with few windows – most everything is underground. Pipelines line the hallways and some doors bear the imprints of hands that were thrown, from tussles and outbursts, because the base was painted in sadness and loss more than anything, and that often led to rage. Chanyeol knows that, at least, though he seldom acts on it; he instead works with Jongdae to hide Kyungsoo's things and play pranks on Sehun in the hospital bays, his ranger friend who had been injured the past month, in order to get release from the tension. The base is his home, in sickness and in health, in joy and in pain, and he's learned in the past few years how to cope with that in the healthiest way.

Well, as healthy as he can be.

Chanyeol slides down next to Jongdae, Kyungsoo, Krystal and Yixing in the cafeteria. “How's it the kaiju clock looking?”

Kyungsoo, the chief scientist and part-time technician, audibly sighs. “Badly,” he says flatly. “Awful, even. And now Electra Mira is grounded indefinitely.”

Reflexively, Chanyeol grimaces; he was hoping that Kyungsoo would say the opposite, so that he could drop in the fact that Marshall Kwon had asked him to pilot again gracefully. For the most part, Chanyeol tries to stay out of the politics of the dome, even away from the attacks – working in the control center is too draining on him, every attack triggering memories that he can't deal with. He works in the bays, away from the research, the clean-ups, the pilots; away from everything that makes Pan-Pacific Defense Force just that. Yet it's moments like these where he realizes his detachment from it all would never make it go away, because he's still at the base: he never left.

Jongdae perks up, instead, and swipes Kyungsoo's juice box with a quick hand. “On, the bright side, the Lius from the LA base are being flown out for a while, and Miyazawa from Nagasaki looks like she'll be ready to get back in her suit in a matter of days, and, worst comes to worst, the Russians can be helicoptered in if necessary. So, as long as a kaiju doesn't breach within the next week, maybe we have a chance.” Scowling, Kyungsoo wrestles Jondgae to grab back his drink, ultimately jabbing the brown-haired boy in the ribs. In response, Jongdae squeals and reflexively squirts apple juice everywhere, causing Kyungsoo's grimace to deepen further as one way-ward drop lands directly in his eye. Everyone else laughs at the little tussle, especially Chanyeol, who works up his craziest expression and claps along.

Chanyeol's friends are all higher up on the chain of command than he is, with Kyungsoo acting as the Commanding Cryptozoologist of K-Science and therefore leading the kaiju research team down in the labs and Krystal designated as the Chief LOCCENT, or Local Command Center, Officer with Jongdae as her right-hand man; Yixing and Minseok pilot a jaeger together, as does Sehun with his partner Zitao. 

That’s not to say Chanyeol is some lacky – he’s the Commanding J-Tech Programmer, one of the highest-ranking positions in the Shatterdome: he oversees a team of dozens of jaeger mechanics and engineers as well as works in conjunction with the Weapons Specialists and Neural Bridge Operators on the various aspects of dropping, drifting, and fighting, but on the inside, he’s just a mechanic. His title is Officer Park, yet, he’s still Chanyeol, and he knows it. Most of his days are spent signing off on loads of orders before getting elbow deep in the latest jaeger himself, away from the bureaucracy. Fixing jaegers comes naturally to him: even the more technical aspects, including debugging the code of the communication centers, is easier for him than working through an attack. Jaegers are simple, mechanical; fights are scary, deadly, exhausting, whether he is fighting them himself or watching Sehun and Zitao do it. It never got easier, it never got better, even after years had passed, and he knows now it never will. 

“Park himself, interested in kaiju signatures? Seems out of character,” Krystal murmurs nonchalantly from her side of the bench. “What gives?”

“Nothing,” Chanyeol responds immediately. “I can be interested in the imminent apocalypse without it being out-of-character, Jung. I just want to know how badly you guys are screwing up,” he adds flippantly.

“You sound like Baekhyun,” Kyungsoo fires back, flatly. “Some things will never change.” Jongdae shoots him a look that Chanyeol knows he was supposed to miss, but didn't. He wonders why it's still taboo, but it's probably his fault; public grieving was never much his style, not at 18, not at 20, and not even at 24, and maybe that's what had hurt him most. He walks around and he knows that everyone on the base sees him as a ghost, the ranger that willed himself to stay but couldn't ever get back into a jaeger, and the tragedy that hangs around his head defines him more than how quickly he can repair a Mark II's nuclear reactor. Maybe if he had been able to cry about it, maybe if he – he hadn't just decided he couldn't grieve, if he had given himself some time away, people would be more confident in his stability. But Jongdae's been sending him those looks for as long as Chanyeol's known him, and he knows it's probably never going to change.

Kyungsoo blots his mouth with a napkin. “Anyway, we need new pilots, and we need them fast. We can't just have loans forever. Electra Mira is grounded indefinitely, so all we have is Vanguard Reliance and Hellfire Sigma. We're asking for trouble.”

Across the table, Yixing smiles; he pilots Vanguard Reliance with his buddy from the academy, Minseok. “We're good, but we're not Hellfire good, and sometimes...sometimes you need three jaegers to take down a kaiju.”

Kyungsoo nods. “Next week we will have four jaegers – Inferno Dawn and Beserker Gambit will be up and running – but next month we may have one.” Jongdae pushes Kyungsoo and mouths something to him beneath his hand, but Kyungsoo simply shakes his head. “I'm not being dramatic, Jongdae, I'm being realistic. Anyway, we still have the skeletons for Renegade Tempest and Final Danger, so they could be up and running at any minute, with some spare parts subbed in from Shore Lucky, and last time I checked, Whirlwind Voyager was almost done, right, Chanyeol?”

Chanyeol looks to Kyungsoo. “Yeah, almost,” he adds vacantly. 

“So we have three jaegers and no one to pilot them and absolutely no idea about what kaijus are doing or when they are coming. Everything's great, then?”

Krystal throws up her hands. “Enough jaeger talk outside of the control center, Do, I mean it. If you want to come talk about this with the LOCCENT technicians, then do it there. 

“It's ok, guys,” Chanyeol says. Everyone's gaze switches to him immediately. “I'm ok with hearing this.”

“Well, I'm not,” Krystal snaps back. “I live and breathe jaegers, I don't need to eat with them too. I'll see you guys in the center.” She stands, snatches her tray off the table, and storms off; Kyungsoo eyes her as she does.

Chanyeol reckons she's right. Being primarily a mechanic, it's easy for him to detach from the urgency of it all, but Krystal lives and breathes kaijus, perhaps even moreso than Kyungsoo, so she can't do what Chanyeol can. Especially between repairing the Nagasaki loan, Inferno Dawn, and building Whirlwind Voyager, Chanyeol has the luxury of tuning everything out for months on end. His friends support it, too; he knows they worry that he'll always be a touch too fragile to handle the truth. The only one that actively tries to inform him is Kyungsoo, and sometimes Sehun will update him, but everyone else walks on eggshells – especially Yixing and Jongdae. They all think he can't handle it anymore, and part of him agrees. As he watches Krystal’s form disappear in the hallway, he wonders how much it hurts her too.

* * *

Later on, Chanyeol makes a point to visit Sehun in the hospital bays. It's his first night off in about fifteen days and he'd been neglecting Sehun for quite some time, so he reckons he owes him more than a fifteen-minute check in on his lunch break.

“Chanyeol!” Sehun exclaims when Chanyeol enters the room, his face covered in boyish glee. To Chanyeol, Sehun is both a peer and a baby: he didn't start piloting until Chanyeol had finished, and even though he's been a ranger longer than Chanyeol ever was, he's only dropped a fraction of the times. 

Strangely enough, Sehun’s not alone; there's another boy in the room, sitting beside his bed. He has brooding eyes and lips that seemed to permanently settle to a frown, much like Sehun does, but Chanyeol can't tell if he has Sehun's eternal optimism buried inside him or if he is just as upset as his aspect betrays. He wonders if the other boy is the type of person that wouldn't appreciate a good, old-fashioned handshake, which causes Chanyeol to hesitate before greeting him. Still, Chanyeol's penchant for friendliness wins out, so he extends out a gangly arm to the new boy. “How’s it going?” 

“Good. I’m Jongin,” the boy replies, lips quirking into a smile, reaching back to shake a hand. “Or Kai, I guess; I don't know what Sehun has called me.” He gestures to their mutual friend. “We went to school together.”

“You knew Sehun as a child? Impossible,” Chanyeol deadpans. “Sehun's been hanging around the base so long I thought he just manifested here.”

“Shut up,” Sehun laughs. “I have some bad news.”

“What is it?” Chanyeol asks. He moves to sit in the other chair by Sehun's bed and starts aimlessly rearranging a bouquet somebody had sent the pilot. _Oh, the joys of being a hero,_ Chanyeol thinks to himself, tinged with melancholy; he tries to stifle it down before it shows on his face. 

“I'm grounded,” Sehun says as close to gravely as he can sound. “Oh, when I say it like that it just sounds like I'm just in trouble.” He moves a pensive hand to his face, and strokes his chin for a moment. “No, I mean, I'm not going to drop ever again. The doctors said my body can't handle it." 

“They said he’s going to shatter if he tries to do the neural handshake,” Jongin chimes in. 

“Why do you sound so gleeful when you say that?” Sehun snaps at his companion.

“Because the image of you physically breaking into a thousand pieces while running through Zitao's memory of going to Barney's is hilarious,” Jongin shoots back. The two bicker for a second, but quiet when they see Chanyeol's aspect.

“Oh man,” Chanyeol mutters, but deep down inside he's relieved. It isn't much of a shock, either, since Kyungsoo alluded to it this morning. He knows having Electra Mira grounded means trouble for the Shatterdome, but it means temporary safety for Sehun, even if the end of the world is coming to an end and they're another team short of stopping it. Sehun can stay in the bays and recuperate, away from the ever-stronger kaijus, safe, for now; even Zitao, Sehun's partner, who Chanyeol knows the younger boy has grown to love, is safer too. Chanyeol softens. Sehun is so sweet, beneath it all, and he doesn't deserve to be shattered by loss the way Chanyeol has, especially at his age. 

“It will be ok, Chanyeol,” Sehun offers gently. “It's probably for the best, honestly...I only dropped every couple of months, anyway, so it doesn't feel real now. Hong Kong is fucked, though. It sucks. That's part of the reason why they invited Jongin here, I think.”

“Huh?” Chanyeol questions.

“Jongin and I were in the academy together. He was my first partner.” Sehun gestures to the brown-haired boy with a nostalgic smile, as if recounting pleasant memories from the 24-week-long bootcamp designed to break your spirit.

“Really?” Chanyeol always knew some mysterious circumstances surrounded Sehun's placement with Zitao; he just reckoned that it was because Sehun was a brat and could never find anyone else to tolerate him other than the even brattier Zitao. They’ve been close friends for years but there are certain topics they’ve just never bothered to breech, and they’re friendship has been characterized by periods of absence and presence, of which they rarely discussed the happenings of. It’s the type of relationship where it’s so easy for them to be together, so effortless, they don’t need to tell each other everything. Certain topics are just understood.

“Yeah, I even graduated, and we were going to be stationed in Lima, but then I injured my waist badly, and had to go into recovery. I never dropped,” Jongin answers, straightening out his posture in his chair, as if to prove himself. “I've just been mulling about, dancing, practicing for the ballet, doing this and that, but then I heard about Sehun and I decided I needed to come see him and then...Marshall Kwon asked me to speak with her, she invited me to stay for as long as I wanted. I'm all healed now so I guess I could drop again. But...not with Zitao.” 

“Yeah, he drift tested with Zitao this morning and they are like, completely incompatible,” Sehun laughs. “Like, so incompatible. Kyungsoo would have a better chance with him.” Chanyeol chuckles at the image: Kyungsoo is possibly the most incompatible person to walk this earth. He can't imagine anyone getting through to him, especially Zitao, who, despite his bratty air, did have a heart of gold inside and a knack for drifting. “I guess keep it quiet though…Marshall Kwon said not to tell anyone she was doing drift tests, but…”

“But who cares what she says?” They laugh. “Well, welcome to Hong Kong then. I'm surprised none of the LOCCENT guys told me about your arrival,” Chanyeol says, shooting his award-winning smile over to Jongin. “Being a pilot isn't all it's cracked up to be, though. You're probably too pretty to do it, that's what I always told Sehun.” He turns to Sehun, shaking his head. “You should have been a model.”

In response, Sehun mocks Chanyeol's laugh and pushes his front ears forward. “Hey!” Chanyeol shouts. “Dumbo jokes are out of line! I was complimenting you!”

Jongin watches the scene with mild bemusement, and once they quiet down, he turns back to Chanyeol. “So what do you do around here?”

“Me? I'm just a mechanic. I work in the bays, tuning up current jaegers, deconstructing old ones, and building new ones.”

Sehun rolls his eyes. “Chanyeol used to be a pilot, though.”

“Really?” Jongin asks.

“Years ago,” Chanyeol responds, faking casual. “You probably don't remember it.”

“As if,” Sehun adds, refusing to accept Chanyeol's hesitance. “He piloted Renegade Tempest. He’s _that_ Park Chanyeol.”

Jongin perks up, his eyes alighting with a glint that had been absent just moments earlier, his posture suddenly as straight as Sehun's, his mouth parted ever so slightly in awe. “Oh wait – you're _that_ Park Chanyeol? His Park Chanyeol?”

Chanyeol groans. “Yeah, yeah, I am.” _I was,_ he thinks, but keeps it to himself. 

Shooting Chanyeol a curious look, Sehun picks up on his friend's reluctance to speak in a second. “Isn't he uglier in person?” he jokes, trying to make light of the fact that he may have brought up something Chanyeol wasn't ready to talk about. “His ears are just so big.”

“You do look...different.” Jongin studies his face. “I mean, I don't know. You had those crazy hair colors and everything, and you looked bigger standing next to Baekhyun. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you. Sehun talks about you all the time.”

Chanyeol scoffs, burrowing his arms into his oversized jacket. “I am big. Taller than you both, at least.”

 _It’s true though_ , he thinks. His current appearance doesn’t impress the way he used to. Back when he piloted, he was tall, muscular, handsome, his hair coiffed, his smile big, and his body always accompanied by Baekhyun. Every television appearance was included a new suit and, of course, most people recognized him from images of him loping out of a jaeger, clad in a shining, sleek suit of white. Not quite the same look as he sports now - Adidas track pants and a cap pushed on top of a shaggy mop of hair, alone and far from the city.

“I didn’t say you were short,” Jongin hastily tries to defend himself, but Sehun just snickers.

They talk for hours, and Chanyeol eventually returns to his dorm late. He walks Jongin to the guest rooms, speaking lightly about this and that. They don’t click, necessarily, but there’s a certain easiness that Chanyeol embraces around new people who don’t know him yet; it gives him motivation to try harder.

Inside, he knows he needs to be liked.

“Night, Chanyeol. It was amazing to meet you,” Jongin says, almost dreamily, as he turns towards the door.

“Goodnight, Jongin,” Chanyeol says back. “I wouldn’t call it amazing, though meeting you was cool.” There’s a certain hesitance in Chanyeol’s response he hopes Jongin doesn’t notice. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t really felt like a rockstar in years, and on this day, he’s felt it twice; maybe it’s just guilt, plain and simple.

Tonight, Chanyeol dreams in shades of grey and red and blue, then it all fades to black. He awakes in a sweat, just as he has every day since.

* * *

The next day returns quickly to normal, and Chanyeol finds himself in the bays until late afternoon without a meal. Jiho, one half of the jaeger Hellfire Sigma, and his crew bound through the Shatterdome as Chanyeol takes his first break from his nonstop repairs, and he can’t help but let his gaze linger on the group.

The Hellfire Sigma team is composed of good guys, though they are rowdy and sure of their power - Jiho holds the title of one of the few left to have piloted a jaeger on his own, because during a category III attack, his brother’s wires malfunctioned, disconnecting from the drift, leaving Jiho alone to disarm the kaiju while waiting for reinforcements to come in and then run back to base. Reinforcements took 77 seconds to come in, the longest 77 seconds of Jiho's life, but he is a star for it now. His partner, his brother, who, despite being a talented pilot in himself, lacks the sheer star power Jiho possesses, is eternally grateful to the younger boy.

The rest of his squad are programmers and mechanics that Jiho trusts and protects. Kyung, Taeil, Minhyuk, Yukwon, Jaehyo, and Jihoon, a star-studded staff of young, attractive men locked in Jiho's fame as a Jaeger pilot. There is only one group more revered than the Hellfire team - Shore Lucky's, and that's for other reasons altogether.

Chanyeol, himself, had also piloted a jaeger on his own. It was for 895 seconds, but for different reasons. Where Jiho has room and reason to revel in his accomplishments, Chanyeol has only grief. By the time he had realized what a feat he had accomplished, like most old jaeger pilots, he had already faded into obscurity. He is but a year older than Jiho, and younger than some of the other members of the Hellfire team, but sometimes he feels as if he had lived lifetimes more. On the base, watching, waiting, knowing.

He rolls himself back underneath Inferno Dawn once he realizes the boys are going to the cafeteria. There's a job to do, and he'll be damned if he doesn't do it. It's a thought – a TV banner scrolling alongside his life, and _Shore Lucky_ in bright letters, but he doesn't act upon it. In the back of his head, he still thinks of a Midwestern bar, a guitar, and a grave. Three of them.

A voice calls out to him, “Chanyeol?”

The voice is Sayaka's, who is a leave from the Nagasaki base, with her partner Sae Miyazawa, but she's been so helpful that Chanyeol's already loathing their eminent return to Japan. Inferno Dawn, her jaeger, got pretty beat up in battle against the kaiju Iganto, so it's been out of commission for a few weeks, and Sae's resting up her injuries, so she doesn't have much to do – most pilots would hang around and train in this position, but Sayaka instead decided to help out by working with LOCCENT and the mechanics in the bays. She's more than familiar with the coding language and the people that know jaegers best are the pilots, so she's proven to be vital to the operation of repairing Inferno Dawn. It also helps that's she's sweet with a killer sense of humor; Chanyeol knows he will miss her when she's gone.

“Yes, Akimoto?”

She laughs, and it tinkles, echoing through the Shatterdome. It's very honest, the way she laughs; part girlish giggle and part hearty chuckle, almost untouched by sadness. “Just Sayaka is fine. Can you help me while I tune-up some of Inferno's communication signals?”

Extending a freakishly long leg out from underneath him, Chanyeol lopsidedly pulls himself after Sayaka in a show of flailing limbs that would put any pubescent boy to shame. Once a pillar of posture and poise, Chanyeol's control of his body has significantly declined in the past few years.

“You used to be a pilot and you walk like that?” Sayaka asks, laughing as he accidentally waves an arm into a rack of tools, causing them to dangerously teeter back and forth

“Hey!” Chanyeol snaps back, laughing as he attempts to steady the rack. “I'll have you know I was an amazing pilot, long legs and all!”

“I know,” Sayaka says. She's looking at him warmly, softly, yet not with pity. It's the time of day when the sun hits the small windows in the ceiling of the Shatterdome, bathing the entire staging area in golden light. In these moments, the jaegers look even more stunning, like something out of a movie, all shining suits of armor and cannons waxed clean; he looks over to Shore Lucky, a gaunt Mark I that has been stripped of all of its parts but its skeleton, left to rot in its old bay, a monument to more hopeful times. Its red shell impresses on Chanyeol, looking like an old spirit, sent to watch over him, towering above humanity, eternal even in its decay. As the sun peaks in the sky, Chanyeol and Sayaka’s eyes meet and for a second he is taken back in time; she is alight, her hair is shining, her eyes sparkling. She is but 28, looking 16; she laughs warmly. In that second she is Baekhyun, standing on the beach with Chanyeol back when he was just a boy.

 

 

 

> _“Come with me,” a younger Chanyeol says. His hair is long and out of control, waving around him, dyed a bright orange. His body suits him less than ever before, growing at a rate he can't understand, giving him no time to settle into the new rhythms of walking before he starts growing again again. It's summer in Hong Kong, but it's not raining for the first time in a week; they're on the beach, with sand running through their toes, still young enough to find it romantic._
> 
> _Baekhyun looks to Chanyeol and their eyes meet and he is enchanted; Baekhyun's brown eyes, deep and smooth, his smile, his youth, all younger than ever before. For a moment, time is frozen, and warm golden light washes over Baekhyun._
> 
> _“I have to do this,” Chanyeol insists, reaching out for his partner's hand. “It's my destiny.”_
> 
> _“I know,” Baekhyun responds, looking at him fondly, distantly, surely. He is 16, and he's in love with a boy who wants to save the world. He’s sitting in that boy’s city, hundreds of miles from home; and the idea of going back without him crushes his soul. Chanyeol knows that Baekhyun is good, so good; Chanyeol knows Baekhyun wants to be with him. He knows more than anything that he loves Baekhyun, but he doesn't understand yet that the apocalypse is coming, and there are always casualties._

He looks to Sayaka and holds her gaze. She is young, but five years older than him; he always wonders what it's like to be that age and still fighting kaijus. The moment passes, and suddenly they are back in the present. A cloud drifts through the sky through the sky, breaking back into the rain that had been plaguing the city for weeks. It's summer in Hong Kong, and Sayaka is 28, and Chanyeol is 24, and he really shouldn't be getting caught up in sunny moments in the Shatterdome anymore.

Eventually, he will leave here.

He and Sayaka settle into a rhythm, him setting up clamps and grabbing tools while she rewires Inferno Dawn's communication center. The repairs are second nature, so he allows his mind to wander. He'll go with Sehun, he thinks; Sehun is still young, can get back into the real world, go to real school.

He thinks of that moment on the beach with Baekhyun, eight years ago, still vivid as if it was yesterday. Why was he so sure then? Where did his energy go?

“How's Miyazawa doing?” Chanyeol asks.

Sayaka rolls her head evenly from side to side, exhibiting no sense of urgency. “It is difficult to watch her like this, but she loves to fight more than anything else. So we will keep fighting for her.”

She smiles at him, and for a second he swears that the falling rain sounds like the waves. When he goes to sleep that night, he hears the tide pulling in and out, reliably, sure as summer.

* * *

 

 

> _Echoing silence. More of it than he could ever handle...weighing him down with every step, as if he's moving...one body, two bodies, three bodies more...Blood is seeping down his nose and there is only silence and the screams of the kaiju, and his head will burst soon... It's all fading. Only a little bit longer...Only a little bit longer...Only a little bit longer...When he blinks the colors wash into one another, leaving just an image... a rush of cold seawater splashes through...keep going, keep going..._
> 
> _Renegade Tempest is plastered all throughout the city. It's bustling, and he can't hear a thing but the repeated echoes of truth: you’re everything to me, you’re everything to me…_
> 
>   

“Marshall Kwon, a minute?”

Chanyeol peers his head into Boa's office the next day, during breakfast, the one time when the base's halls filter clean enough that he won't be seen sneaking off. He’s dressed up for the visit: instead of his usual repair clothes, he's in a button up and slacks, looking spiffy, serious. It's what he would wear if he ever had a job interview, he thinks. He probably never will, though. 

The woman is sitting in her chair and does a once-over of ever younger Chanyeol, cracking a smile at the sign of him in a button down. She tilts her head slightly, letting him know to enter, so he slides in quietly.

“Were you serious with your offer?” he asks, sitting down across from her.

She takes off her glasses, polishing them in her hands. “Yes.”

“Why?” Chanyeol responds immediately. “Why now?”

Marshall Kwon deeply inhales, taking a moment to prepare her speech. For a second she looks wistful, almost, but maybe it's just nostalgia, or, more likely, exhaustion; Chanyeol knows she has reason to feel all three. “With Sehun unfit to drop, Electra Mira is left grounded until we find a suitable partner for Zitao, _if_ we can.” She sighs, emphasizing the _if_ with verve that they both know is because it isn't possible. “That leaves us with just Hellfire Sigma and Vanguard Reliance, and though Jiho is one of the strongest we've seen, he overpowers his brother and that kind of imbalance hinders defense tactic, especially since Jiho seems incapable of running anything other than pure offense. Inferno Dawn is slated to leave within the month, and Beserker Gambit is only on loan until we fill the gaps in our program - if a kaiju surfaces anywhere near LA they're going to be calling the Lius over there so fast we won't have time to watch the helicopters fly in. We need a new jaeger up and running, and fast. Otherwise, we're, and I do not say this lightly, _fucked_ in a month, that's that.”

Chanyeol nods. “But where do I come in?”

“ _And fast._ We don't have completely trained pilots that have drifted before laying around, let alone ones that have been in out of jaegers and killed kaijus. Sure, Zitao is here, but it being his third partner, it may be difficult for him to overcome the trauma well enough to be able to train, and drift, again with a stranger. He's just not ideal; Zitao's always been a bit difficult, despite how well he means. His parents are worried too, you know. We tried to stick him with Jongin, since Jongin and Sehun were compatible, so maybe through mutual drifting him and Zitao could be, but it failed...miserably. He can’t do this forever.”

Marshall Kwon moves, turning towards the window, away from her screens, crossing her arms in the process.  “Other than that, there's no one except you and Krystal, and Krystal can't drift with anyone but her sister. We figured that out years ago, when Jessica first left. Finding someone suitable for one partner is easy, but randomly searching for two partners that can drift...that's hard. Even if we find twins or siblings out of the academy, they still need to be trained. The longer we put off filling up a jaeger, the more vulnerable we become. Akimoto and Miyazawa can't be here forever, Minseok wants to retire soon, and the Woo brothers only seem invincible.”

“So, you're asking me to – to save the world? Three years later?

“Chanyeol...” she sighs again, and it is traced with sadness now. “I know you never want to step foot in a jaeger again, and the idea of drifting again after all this may feel impossible, but we need you. You've always been easy to drift with – you managed to get through to Baekhyun, who's so goddamn nosey. Some people just can't drift: they carry too much in, they worry too much about who they are drifting with. You've always carried a lot in, but for some reason you could do it. You were raised to let it all go, and only you have this talent.”

It's moments like these, he thinks, where past blends to present. It was just five years ago, in the summer, that Marshall Kwon had looked to him with the same hope and desperation. He was smaller then, with brighter hair, more assured, different. With his smile and his genuine belief that destiny existed and he was following it. He wanted it, then. He wanted to be a pilot more than anything in the world, he wanted to be famous, he wanted to save everyone. Back then, with the rain falling, skyline blurring into a downpour, continuing on in spite of the breach pulling open, he thought he was going to stop the apocalypse.

Does he still?

“And honestly,” Marshall Kwon begins, filling in Chanyeol's silence, but she is hesitant, and he can feel it. “Honestly, you're _Park Chanyeol.”_ She sweeps her hands wildly around. “You're not just some boy, or some ranger. You were _the ranger_. And I know you are going to let this all go to your head,” she chuckles, “but you were the legend you always wanted to be. You're good at being famous, all long legs and smiles...you were the face of the jaeger program. To get you back in a jaeger...that would be big.”

He thinks about it – he does. There's images; a news crawl, _Shore Lucky_ in big letters. It could all be his, again, the rush, the thrill, the kill – really, nothing compares. Being a hero, on the screen, not just behind the scenes. He can’t fix jaegers for the rest of his life – but he can't imagine leaving the Shatterdome with so much unfinished business, either.

 _Silence...white noise gone awry but it's just nothingness, stretching for miles...when he looks to the water he sees dead bodies floating...I will always love you...They're gone, Chanyeol...everything is mixing into grey and blue and red...the stretch of water...They're gone, Chanyeol...the ring of alarms inside, telling him to leave...his hands...the blood...I will always love you, always, always love you...only a little longer...I know...They’re gone, Chanyeol...They’re gone…_

“I'm so sorry, but...I can't.”

Marshall Kwon nods, a mixed look of relief and contemplation hitting her face. “Then, as a favor to me, I request one last thing of you.” She looks at him, and he sees the desperation in her face, in her parted lips, her sallow cheeks, her swollen eyes. She’s smaller now than she was years ago; still fierce, but now he towers over her, and sometimes, for a brief second, he sees in the Marshall an exhaustion that never before existed. Desperation, maybe; forgiveness, too. In all parts he sees in her, the thing that scares him the most is the absence of ambition.

For all the years he's spent floating around the base, she never asked much of him; she moved him to nice quarters, kept him around, taught him everything, promoted him, let him amble around without much to do or say. He owes her this, this one last favor, before he leaves, to keep her strong against the apocalypse in exchange for those two years of stardom and five of seeming normalcy.

“Anything,” he says, and he means it.

She sighs, her lips parting into a small smile. “Zitao's first partner, before Oh, was never a good match,” Marshall Kwon comments. She folds her hands neatly in her lap, looking at the screens around her, her lips pressed in a line. Chanyeol waits; by now, he knows her well enough – well enough to call her Boa some nights, when they were drinking, back when they used to celebrate because things actually went right – to be sure that she will tell him in time.

The silence weighs heavy between them. Marshall Kwon sighs, reflective. Things were simpler many years ago, Chanyeol reckons. They were for him.

“This program has come a long way. Since then, at least. We used to – we used to let babies in, children really, suit them up and pray. There was a golden age of pilots, of course...” Her voice trails off a bit, and he can almost hear it crack. Chanyeol knows that the two-thirds of the original six were dead now, everyone but her and Lieutenant Chung. Twice it was kaijus, but for the two youngest it was just radiation, though the leaders were reluctant to admit it. He often wonders if she, too, was waiting for the nose bleeds to start. Even more often, he worries that they already have. “We put them together because they seemed to work at first; it was the second wave then, and we were short pilots and time in spades. Not as bad as we are today, but the worst we had yet to see. I'm sure you remember, _you were there,_ of course, lest I forget...”

Though her eyes never leave the screens, he can see the flashbacks running by. That is something about Boa; she has never been hard to read, not for him. She used to watch him practice the guitar with clumsy fingers, the same fingers that learned to code in the communication center, to assemble a nuclear reactor; she was even there when he confessed for the first time – to her, of course, because she had been his first love. In turn, he had learned enough about her to understand what she meant, and when it hurt the most; one of the original six had been her brother, another, her lover. The first two – well, they both knew what they had meant.

“He left, Wu did. You know, you saw what happened. Zitao was younger than you at the time, so he couldn't get him back, couldn't...couldn't find a way to guilt him yet. The drift between them was strong, but not strong enough. Zitao has moved on, since, of course, but the effect of having a distant first partner shows in his current work; he will have to retire soon. The loss of Sehun has hurt him too much, and even when Oh recovers, I don't think Zitao will.”

“So what are you saying?”

“His partner...” she began, and unfolded her hands. Swiveling her chair, she comes to face Chanyeol. “Wu is the man you'll have to find, since he runs the black market now. It's a small scale, but...you know how it is for pilots once they get out.”

“You can't go back to normal after it.”

“You would know.” Marshall Kwon finally looks Chanyeol in the eyes. “Wufan is out there, and you must find him.” She hands him a business card with a reflective symbol on it: a mountain peaking through clouds, and lightening striking beneath it. _Classic Wu_ , Chanyeol thinks internally; the boy used to brag about how his eyebrows looked like lightening strikes. “Take this card, and follow the path. I know it isn’t far.”

* * *

It isn’t far.

That’s the first thing that Chanyeol notices when he approaches what he realizes with almost 100% certainty is Wufan’s base. Located in the Red Light District of Hong Kong, it isn’t concealed or even removed – it’s just, kind of, there, a storefront with a lightning bolt on it, squished between a bar and a pawnshop.

Chanyeol decided to go on his mission without telling Kyungsoo, Jongdae, or even Sehun; there was something about having to admit to them that he is choosing to be a coward instead of returning to a jaeger would probably be the final nail in the coffin of his demise. For some reason, he thinks telling Sehun would be the hardest; maybe because Sehun sees something in him that he knows he can’t be. Even Kyungsoo sees right through him, and he knows what they would say: _you want this._

But does he?

It’s raining, and the wet streets reflect the neon signs in a scene straight from a watercolor. Red and blue and grey; the night sky seeping into the streets, and the red lights bursting in the sky. _Red and blue and grey…_ People pass by Chanyeol as if he is invisible; for all the fear he has about being recognized on the streets, it becomes apparent that maybe he isn’t _that_ Park Chanyeol anymore. It used to be that he was a superstar, so well recognized that him and Baekhyun couldn’t get a moments peace; even when he was younger, he was a star. But now…now he is invisible, just as he tries to be on the base.

He doesn’t know if he wants it.

The image of Jongin’s mouth as it twisted in glee when he realized that Chanyeol was, in fact, _that_ Park Chanyeol reflects in his mind. Where was that? Why does he want it still?

_Red and blue and grey…_

The image comes back to him, and he feels frozen in time again; to fight it, he marches right into Wufan’s front, filled with bravado and machismo that he knows isn’t real.

“Who are you?” a voice booms.

Chanyeol is immediately greeted by a less than chipper man, sitting behind a desk with a phone on it. The walls are completely bare, except for a sparse few travel posters promoting exotic destinations that Chanyeol thinks may be made up. Behind the man’s desk is a door, with a splintering handle.

“I’m Park Chanyeol,” Chanyeol says, figuring honesty may be his only way in.

“You need an appointment in order to plan your trip,” the man responds immediately. “You’re not on the list.”

“You didn’t look at a list,” Chanyeol says, looking the man square in the eyes.

“The list is up here,” the man replies, tapping a smug finger to his brain. “I’m smart. And you need to leave.”

“I’m from Pan Pacific. I’m here for Wufan.”

The man jolts, before moving back, his arm reaching for something in his pocket. _A gun,_ Chanyeol thinks, and instinctively the part of his brain that made him such a good ranger turns on. “You’re not welcome here.”

“I think we can change that,” Chanyeol states, with a smile, spreading his arms in order to assert that he is unarmed. “I’m not carrying. No badge, either. Personal business.”

In that moment, the man lunges forward, drawing his gun; reflexively, Chanyeol jumps to the side, twisting his body around, causing the man to fall forward with force. Chanyeol swings out a firm leg and knocks the man’s elbow from behind, and which causes his hand to release the gun and his face to contort in pain. _The funny bone,_ Chanyeol grins; it was a move him and Baekhyun had come up with years ago in the kwoon room, where they would slam their opponents in the place that causes the strangest pain in order to quickly disarm them. Lunging for the gun, Chanyeol grabs it with his long fingers and immediately fastens it in the band of his jeans, but the man seems to have regrouped his strength and is ready to fight again.

Chanyeol realizes the man moves a lot like Wufan did: there’s a certain heaviness to the blows, determination and strength, but he doesn’t have the grace that Wufan had trained with Zitao to achieve, so instead he is relying on force instead of agility or speed. The easiest way to trip up Wufan, Chanyeol remembers, was very similar to the way someone would take down himself:

Throw off his balance.

Quickly, Chanyeol starts leaping about the room, using the length of his legs to propel him lightly from spot to spot, and the man falls for every false step, throwing himself towards the image of Chanyeol only to realize that Chanyeol had already moved. After the fourth jump, the man tumbles forward, head-first into the wall, and quickly passes unconscious. Chanyeol reaches down and grabs the keys off his belt, and takes note of the man’s state. _He’ll be fine_ , Chanyeol knows, but he still feels bad.

The thrill of that fight, though, it’s really something. Something he hasn’t felt in years.

Moving towards the door, Chanyeol uses the keys to unlock the splintering handle and is lead down a dank, bleak hallway. After winding around the building for what feels like miles, he finally begins to hear the sounds of life. At the end of the hall, he enters a fluorescently-lit room filled to the brim with workers buzzing about different contraptions housing pieces of kaijus: brains, livers, skins, even their parasites. Chanyeol is in absolute awe, marveling at the grotesque sight of a world completely taken over by kaijus. He turns to the head of the room and sees Wufan, with his back turned, talking to two seeming employees who are demonstrating different powders to him. Even after all this time, Wufan is still iconic – tall, broad-shouldered, but hunched over, and though he has swapped his old hair out for a new cut, he looks all the same.

“Still using the Electra symbol, huh, Wufan?” Chanyeol calls.

Wufan turns around on his heel immediately, and a bunch of Wufan’s lackeys stand, all reaching for their guns. Once buzzing with excitement, the entire room’s attention silently turns to Chanyeol, and he feels the weight of the gun he took in the back of his jeans, but he doesn’t know how to use it – and doesn’t want to learn.

“Chanyeol,” Wufan announces from the top of the room. Despite his firm aspect, his eyebrow trembles and Chanyeol sees, beneath his well-tailored suit, the boy that arrived on the base all those years ago, which signals a wave of relief to wash over him: Wufan hasn’t changed, and that should make this easier.

“By the way, I did a number on your receptionist,” he claims, his voice dripping with fake concern, his smile twisting in the goofy way his face is wont to do. “I think you should go check on him, before he’s out for too long.”

Wufan nods to a right-hand man standing on the side of the room, who immediately scurries for the door. Chanyeol continues to advance towards the head of the room, realizing that with every step he takes, Wufan’s lackeys inch closer to him; still, they hold fire, so Chanyeol doesn’t stop.

“Boa sent me,” Chanyeol says as he strides down the room. “Told me you wouldn’t be hard to find. She was right, I guess.”

Staring at Chanyeol, Wufan waves off his two associates, who quickly scuttle out of the room. Everyone here is strange to Chanyeol; they seem to worship Wufan, which baffles him. He was once a jaeger pilot, which is the closest thing to godly, so maybe it makes some sense. And yet, here, where he oversees the sale of pieces of monsters that he once killed – that is where he has come into his role as a leader.

But Chanyeol knows Wufan, knows him better than most. The problem with Wufan is that a lot of the myth surrounding him is attributed entirely to his physical traits, and maybe the legend of his father. When you're 190 centimeters with broad shoulders and thick, upward facing eyebrows, most people begin to assume that you're threatening. And, Chanyeol notices, Wufan is playing that up: his lackeys follow his orders, but they probably just haven't realized that Wufan is the human equivalent of a pastry – a crispy outside that collapses in a second, revealing lots of fluff and custard. Also, covered in powdered sugar.

He knows who Wufan was all those years ago, the man made of the same softness that caused his eyebrow to tremble, and he hopes that he can get through to him.

“Why are you here, Park?” Wufan finally asks, once Chanyeol is but three feet from him.

“I’m here to ask you to be a hero again.”

Instantly, Wufan softens, and he looks down ever so slightly on Chanyeol. In his eyes, Chanyeol sees flickers of memories, much like the drift, floating by: moments on the base, the thrill of a kill, the pride that comes with saving the world, the warm feeling inside when someone thanks you for protecting them.

“There’s nothing quite like it, huh?” Chanyeol says. Wufan looks to him, finally returning to this instant. Chanyeol smiles. “That feeling of knowing that you’re the reason why the world is safer. When you’re in a jaeger…you’re god, aren’t you? Or close to it. Completely unstoppable.” Chanyeol looks around, taking in all the gross concoctions that fill Wufan’s life; he feels Wufan’s gaze on him, heavy, but nostalgic, familiar. “Much better than scuttling around corpses, that’s for sure,” he adds with a laugh.

Suddenly, Wufan breaks eye contact with Chanyeol, motioning to a lackey. “You should go.”

As two women approach to escort Chanyeol out, he boggles: had his plan not worked? He expected at least a couple more minutes of Wufan’s soft, watering eyes before he got thrown out, at least. One of the woman places of a firm grip on Chanyeol’s arm, and he worries that a scene will start if she feels the gun in the back of his jeans, so he flings out a hand to latch onto Wufan's sleeve and yanks the man down.

“Not long,” Chanyeol pleads, staring into Wufan’s eyes. “One more drift, one more drop, one more kill. That's all. Then you're out – for good.”

Chanyeol knows what to say: Wufan is starstruck, unable to respond. Growing up around Wufan, he knows that he's just a pastry. And all it takes is the right words to have him crack. The women interpret Wufan’s hesitance as weakness, and let go of Chanyeol, letting the two boys stare at each other, but they hover not far behind.

“Don't you feel guilty?” Chanyeol hisses.

Wufan pales. Chanyeol's got him.

“Well, do you?” Chanyeol’s voice is becoming louder. “Don't you feel bad? For fucking over the Force, for leaving us to scramble to find a replacement? Don't you feel bad, when Yixing was injured that day? Don't you wonder what happened to Zitao when the man he worshipped up and left one day, without a word, a man he shared half a brain with, someone he thought he could hold no secrets from, left? Do you think Zitao didn't see it coming? Do you think Zitao isn't wracked by guilt because he couldn't stop you? You owe us. You owe _everyone._ ”

“I don’t owe anyone, anything,” Wufan replies, but his voice is shaking. “I did my service, which is more than most do.”

Chanyeol loudly scoffs. “Please, what service?” He rolls his eyes. “You know, I could go over a thousand things that I hated about you, growing up. When you used to steal my Doritos, and when you snuck into the family kitchens to get milk and extra rations. You'd switch my clothes out of the washing machine so yours would dry first. Sneaky things. That's what you were – sneaky.” Chanyeol jabs a finger into Wufan’s chest, and he feels the lackeys around him all tense up. He’s entering dangerous territory, on enemy grounds, but he owes this to Boa, and he can’t leave without giving it a try. “A soft little furball begging for approval and being pushed around but damn, you were sneaky. And I should have known, then, that you'd fuck us all over. I really should have known that you'd leave. When you get a brat like Zitao all wrapped around your finger, it's obvious you've got plans up your sleeve. But to hurt him like that, that's cold. Icy. And that's coming from me, man, so don't think I don't know just how cold we have to be; life's a calculation, but yours…” Pausing, Chanyeol feels something in his throat, and he wonders if Wufan is feeling it too. “I've done things I regret, I've hurt people, I put up walls so I can be well-liked, and I'm sneaky, and I'm – I hurt the person I loved most in the world, and _I lost him_ , and I'm not ever getting him back, and I think about it every day, because it hurts more than anything I've ever felt. I didn't think I could love anyone but myself the way I loved Baekhyun. But you _chose_ to lose Zitao. You chose this. How can you live with yourself?”

Wufan looks at him for one more second, then straightens himself up. “Go now, before I _make_ you go.” The two lackeys return, hovering dangerously close to Chanyeol, and he knows they mean business.

“I should have known,” Chanyeol sneers, waving off the arm of his escort, before turning to leave. “You will never change.”

* * *

“Chanyeol!”

Chanyeol turns to see Wufan running towards him. He looks half a cartoon, all abnormally long legs awkwardly strutting out from beneath him, splashing water and mud all over his designer suit. The rain has stopped falling, but it’s still wet and dangerous out, the streets full of puddles.

Chanyeol managed to leave the building without much fuss, opting to sneak out through a back door to avoid the receptionist from earlier. The lackeys watched him go, their faces smug, but they didn’t chase him – as if they knew that there was something more than just the Force versus the underground going about.

“Look I-” Wufan begins the minute he reaches Chanyeol, out of breath.

“Yes?” Chanyeol responds, mincing no words. He wants to go home; he needs to go tell Marshall Kwon he failed again, and that maybe he can't ever help her, and the two years he tried were the best he could do in exchange for her kindness. That he is useless, just waiting around for a chance he doesn’t deserve.

“I know what I've done,” Wufan insists, “and I know it was wrong. I can't go back though, maybe you understand – with what happened to -”

And in this moment, something in Chanyeol snaps.

He lunges for Wufan, grabbing him by the collar and throwing him into the wall. Physically, they're an even match, with Wufan only a couple centimeters taller than Chanyeol and just a touch broader, but he wiggles beneath Chanyeol's firm grip like jello. The years Chanyeol had spent helping Sehun train and stay in shape are paying off, and his grip on Wufan's neck is firm and unwavering.

“You would never even know what I went through,” Chanyeol snaps, his voice dripping with venom as he shakes Wufan against the wall, knocking his head back. “You left out of greed. I didn't choose anything, and when I lost it all I still _fought._ ”

“But would you go back?” Wufan whimpers, hanging limply, like putty in Chanyeol’s arms.

“I stayed!” Chanyeol shouts. “I stayed, I never left! I've been there this entire time!” He shakes Wufan with a force and then throws him down to the ground, where Wufan lands with a grunt, crumpling his lanky body into the fetal position. “Who are you to say this to me? I’m still Park Chanyeol!”

Wufan lays on the ground for a second, silent, the only noise between them being the sound of Chanyeol's heavy breathing and the hum of traffic.

“It's not – look, Chanyeol,” Wufan finally eeks out once he realizes Chanyeol is not going in for seconds, his voice softer and less sure than before, “I know what I did was wrong. I wish it didn't have to go this way. But it did, and it does, and we're here, and – and I don't mean ill to the Jaeger program or Pan Pacific, I wish the best, and the work I did there – it really – everything, it's uh -”

“I always knew you were a pastry,” Chanyeol scoffs, running a bleeding hand through his hair. _There’s no point_ , he thinks; _Wufan is a lost cause_. His body is humming with anger and excitement and he doesn’t know what to do with it, but he looks to Wufan on the ground and can’t help but feel bad for the man he had spent all those years with.

“A pastry?” Wufan asks, confused.

“You've got those lackeys around your fingers, but I know the real you: covered in powder sugar. You stay in there, all tough and big, but when it comes out here, between me and you, the boy that I grew up with is still in there. And he hasn’t been training.”

Wufan blinks a couple times. “Uh...thank you.”

“Not a compliment. Take this, also.” Chanyeol drops the gun on the ground next to Wufan. He wants nothing to do with it.

Wufan crinkles his nose, before deciding to let it be, and reaches out to take the gun. “I'm going....I have money. Funding. I know Pan Pacific needs it. I can't pilot, not now, not again. It's a fact. But I can give you money.”

A pause passes between them as Wufan moves to stand up, clearly still in pain. Looking on, Chanyeol feels remorseful, but not much so. He knows he lost his temper, but it felt so right – he’s still Park Chanyeol, he never changed. Wufan turns to walk away, and Chanyeol sees his figure receding in the distance, and he wonders if this is the same image that Zitao saw all those years ago when he first left, and he wonders how Zitao felt when he let Sehun in. Where did it go, after all this time? Was a part of Zitao everlastingly Wufan’s, or, in time, did it heal and change – did it become Sehun’s?

What if Zitao hadn’t wanted it to change?

“Look, Chanyeol,” Wufan says, turning back, about fifteen meters from Chanyeol, “you're not like me. I'm sure you'll find a reason.”

“This doesn't mean I forgive you,” Chanyeol calls back.

Wufan smiles, and he looks sad, “I know you can't. I...can't exactly forgive myself.”

“Why, then?”

“Things were different then,” Wufan chuckles, “and I was young and foolish. I thought I deserved to be safe, and I knew I deserved better than I was getting. I saw things I shouldn't have, I saw a future that I didn't want, so I betrayed a boy that loved me for something more. And I don't regret it, but that doesn't mean I forgive myself, either.” He sighs, his voice tinged with nostalgia, reflecting on a time and place that will only exist forever in a memory. “Still, I would do it again, but maybe in a way so fewer people got hurt. You get put in places Chanyeol, and loving yourself doesn’t mean…doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. But it doesn’t mean you’re doing the right thing, either.”

“I always knew you were a coward,” Chanyeol shouts at him.

“We all make choices, Chanyeol.” Wufan offers him a tiny grin before he starts walking away. “I'm sure you'll make the right one.”

* * *

“The entire thing was like a dream,” Chanyeol exclaims the next day at lunch. “It was like, everything was out of some action movie.”

“Says the former jaeger pilot,” Minseok adds, but his face is filled with pride.

“I mean it!” Chanyeol retorts. “I was so cool! Like, so then, after Wufan was like, ‘You should go,’ he follows me outside. And he tries to be like, ‘I know what I’ve done,’ and I’m just like, ‘no you don’t!’ So I throw him against the wall, like this,” Chanyeol tries to demonstrate the way he grabbed Wufan by the collar. “And then I’m like, ‘you’re such a pastry.’” Chanyeol’s face is filled with glee as he recounts his tale to his onlookers, and he smashes his hands on the table at the end of every sentence. “And then he’s like,” Chanyeol alters his voice and expression to a pouty one, to mock Wufan’s groveling, “‘I have money, I’ll give you money,’” Chanyeol switches back to his triumphant aspect, “and I’m like, ‘I always knew you were a coward.’ And then I march off into the night.”

“Wow!” His tablemates exclaim in unison, even the usually apathetic Kyungsoo.

“That's fucking icy,” Jongdae exclaims. “Brilliant, but icy. I told you sending Chanyeol was a powerplay on Boa-”

“-Marshall Kwon's part. Our human calculator strikes again!” Krystal shouts.

“Yeah…” Chanyeol trails off, “except that Wufan only gave us money,” he finishes, twirling his fork in his rice. The minute he finished his story, he realized that for all the enjoyment he had felt in beating up Wufan, he hasn’t done PPDF any real favors. Once the rush passes, Chanyeol is back to being tired and apathetic. He knows it was a win, but he knows he should have done something better; he has only improved their situation temporarily, and time is running out. “We're short a pilot and Inferno Dawn leaves next week.”

“The kaiju calculator has one coming out of the rift before the month is up,” Kyungsoo drawls, his aspect filled with disdain and maybe a glimmer of hope. “So now, we have money in spades but no pilots. There's no point in making new jaegers if no one is ever going to be inside them.”

“There's got to be a few rounds coming from the academy soon,” Yixing comments. He’s cutting up an apple and placing each slice on Minseok’s place, who happily eats it in response. Chanyeol’s stomach twists at the loving sight; he doesn’t know why. “Joonmyun said there’s some real promising recruits.”

“Really, promising recruits? Don't you guys get it?” Kyungsoo retorts. “It's basic math. Academy recruits are down 24% this year, and over 60% since the Shore Lucky tragedy.” Jongdae physically recoils, shooting Chanyeol a nervous glance, but Chanyeol stifles it. Shore Lucky's too damn famous for him to care, their images plastered everywhere, their names the very names used to recruit new pilots before. He can't let himself hurt anymore. “The more pilots we lose, the fewer people enlist. So, while they're used to be more wannabe pilots than jaegers, there's more jaegers than pilots now.” Kyungsoo sighs. “A few promising recruits used to mean a dozen teams. Now it means two, maybe three.”

“But the academy still churns out kids like ice cream,” Jongdae grins. “That’s literally what Yixing said.”

“Not true,” Kyungsoo shoots him down mercilessly. “Splitting the recruits between our bases – including Nagasaki, LA, Anchorage, Lima – means that we can only get so many teams in the end. And that's ideal, as if each and every graduate is truly fit to drop. On average, only 50% of them complete Shatterdome training and less than 15% ever take off. And even with all of that, we would still waste several months training them, which is a drain on our resources. We don't have time to waste anymore.”

“So the world is ending, thanks Kyungsoo,” Jongdae deadpans, throwing his hands up. “I know it's bleak but it's not that bleak. There's got to be something we can do. I didn't spend the past four years of my life here just to accept the impending apocalypse when Oh Sehun gets injured.”

“Don’t you see it? We need people that can drift now, not tomorrow; and people like that are hard to find. Why are we all technicians and researchers and mechanics and not rangers? Because we can’t do what they do.”

“The stats show that people that drift best are people who have drifted before and twins, then regular siblings, then parent-child pairs, then best friends, then romantic partners, and then strangers,” Minseok adds as he happily munches on one of Yixing’s slices. Krystal nods in agreement. “We just need some of those.”

“Yes, so easy to find.” Kyungsoo sighs. “What we need now is some family, a prodigy, or a pre-trained team, which are not in abundance, and what we need in the long run is another superstar duo to stir the hearts of idiots like Chanyeol, to convince them to come back to the academy and the bases, which is equally as rare. In light of all the recent tragedies, the only thing that could increase enrollment rate is either the rise of another rockstar team like Hellfire, or the return of some washed up tragedy. Hellfire's one in a million, and people like Chanyeol don't come back.”

“That was a bit insensitive,” Jongdae snaps, putting an arm around Chanyeol. Chanyeol shrugs it off, smiling a bit.

“It's true,” he says. “I didn't.”

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. “You can't come back to something you never left. _You_ stayed. And that's why Marshall Kwon sent you to get Wu, because you're the poster child for determination in the face of tragedy. Just one more drop out of him, even if it was supporting another jaeger, would be enough to convince people that this program is working. But...piloting is hard. Chanyeol would know.”

Chanyeol stands, moving to leave. “I've got to go help Sayaka with Inferno Dawn.”

Immediately, Kyungsoo pales, flushing with an embarrassment he rarely displays. “Look, Chanyeol, I-”

“No,” Chanyeol says, chuckling to hide his unrest, waving a noncommittal hand. “I genuinely need to go. I'll see you both at dinner.” As he walks out, he hears Jongdae chastising Kyungsoo, and wonders why they still work so hard to protect him.

* * *

“That is enough for today, huh, Chanyeol?” Sayaka calls to Chanyeol after an intense session of repair. Inferno Dawn was slated to be up and running again over a month ago, but when Sayaka's copilot, Sae, needed more time to heal, Marshall Kwon ordered them to refurbish some of the jaeger's features so it would be as good as new for its next drop.

A Mark IV, Inferno Dawn is not lacking: light and agile, it boasts multiple limbs and several shooting weapons, from stars to spikes; its right arm releases a brass whip that not only lashes kaijus, but binds them too; and, with its digital core energy cell, it keeps its pilots safe from the radiation that had been harming those that piloted Mark I through III jaegers. She is a beauty, and the recent upgrades, which included adding in acidic nets that could be deployed and a new, more powerful cannon, she has become stronger than ever before.

“Where are you off to, Sayaka?” Chanyeol rolls out from underneath Inferno Dawn, where he had been tweaking the brass spikes that could be deployed to shoot from its foot. Silly things like this still made him giddy, when he is able to isolate himself from it all; he loves working on missiles that could shoot from a leg mid-kick to destroy a _monster._ The strange glee that overcame him in those moments almost stifled down the eternal dread he had been feeling for the past few years, but never for more than a few minutes.

“I am going to see Sae.” Dusting her hands off on her towel, she moves to begin removing her repair suit, revealing her white-ribbed tank top underneath. Her ponytail swishes from side to side as she moves towards the edge of the jaeger bays. For a moment she seems tiny, Chanyeol notes; standing against a forest of massive robots, she is dwarfed. Out in the ocean, she is Inferno Dawn, towering at over two-hundred feet tall; inside though, in this second, she's five-foot-five, small, and vulnerable. Chanyeol's never gotten used to that.

“Is she alright?” he asks, moving to sit upright on his stool.

Sayaka lulls her head from side to side. “It is difficult, for her,” she smiles, warmly, “but she is happy, too. We are excited to be ready to drop again next week.”

“Is it hard?” he asks, seemingly out of nowhere. “You know, to know that it could happen again...?” Six weeks have passed since Miyazawa got injured, and Chanyeol can't help but wonder if Sayaka reveled in the safety of it all; he thinks of his relief when he heard Sehun was no longer fit to drift, knowing that the boy would be safe by his side, for life. Sure, Sehun wills quickly join Chanyeol's ranks of being a washed-up former-pilot that meanders around the base, but that was safer, right? They would all die soon, but at least not painfully, nor immediately; with Sehun out of harm's way, that was one less disaster Chanyeol would focus on every time the alarm began to ring. Soon, they will be able to leave, too.

It seems like Chanyeol's entire life is ruled by these _might-have-beens;_ Marshall Kwon, Zitao, Sehun, Jongin, Wufan, and, of course, himself, burdened by the shadows he carries around with every step. To watch someone still do what he used to – what he was once the best at – almost causes a pain in his heart. Does it hurt more now, knowing all the stakes? He wants to warn Sayaka, because he knows she knows the risks, they always do, but does she really? Does she know that it all ends in silence, movement in the breach that you can't save, a pin dropping on the ocean floor? She's the best, or at least the better part of it; she must, and still he can't help but wonder if he would have done it all over again. If the stakes were still so high, love was still so much: would Chanyeol, fresh out of the academy, made the same choices? Would two months, two years, three lifetimes have been enough to stop him? He takes a deep breath.

“Chanyeol,” Sayaka says, firm and analytical, “you were a ranger.”

“I haven't been a ranger in a long time,” he states, because that's what it is – just the truth. “I've been a technician for most of my life.” That, that isn't true, but it feels like it is.

“Are you telling me you have forgotten?” she asks.  “Have the years away made you forget the hole in your heart?”

 _The hole in his heart._ The hole in his heart, the one that was torn through that one day in Seoul, the one that ripped even more on a rainy night in Bangkok, the one that promised not to repair on a beautiful day in the South Pacific. Did he ever forget? When it all started, huddled up in a shelter, watching the roofs get picked off of buildings – did that hurt more than the night that newscrawls decided that every second of his life would no longer be news?

Has the silence filled it so intensely he has forgotten what had kept him here in the first place? What had brought him here, what had given him the strength to keep fighting, even though he knew that it would inevitably end in pain? Hadn't he always known that there was no choice? When the novelty had worn off, when it was no longer giant fucking robots kicking scary monster ass, when he realized, for good, that this wasn't a game, that heroes only lived long enough to be martyrs – when all that was said and done, wasn't there something else that compelled him to lose so many years fighting a war they may be destined to lose?

“I love Sae,” Sayaka continues, noting that his silence will not produce a response, “but we both know that we love this world more. This world where we met and can love each other in, to know that this world can do these things...bring two souls together like us, that is the most beautiful. So, to save this world, we do all we can. And if we lose ourselves to this world, it is ok. Because without it, there'd be no Sae, no Sayaka, no...Saeyaka.” She laughs, and it hurts him. “I want the world that brought her to me to survive, because I am thankful for what it did.”

There's silence, endless, difficult; harsh. Chanyeol stares at his hands, covered in grease, worn from years of working with these monsters. Guitar callouses don't quite have the same effect that battle scars do, he thinks. He almost laughs, because that's exactly the kind of thing Baekhyun would mock him for – his pretty boy hands, his guitar-playing fingers, what use is it being so blessed when you're wasting it _saving the world?_

 

 

> _“I was gifted with the voice of an angel,” Baekhyun taunts, sitting on the edge of the bed in their shared quarters. “And I was cursed to be born during the apocalypse.”_
> 
> _A younger Chanyeol laughs, strumming at his guitar, while Baekhyun sings along, “I'll always love you,” Baekhyun coos. “I love you so, oh yes, I do. I'll always love you...”_
> 
> _Alongside Chanyeol, Baekhyun is small. Whereas Chanyeol's limbs are gangly and unpredictable, Baekhyun's are elegant and controlled. He's sporting a mop of red hair that Chanyeol helped him dye during a long, dry spell. He's beautiful and young and all twinkling eyes and a mischievous smile and this unique vocal timbre, and there are a million reasons why they shouldn't work so well in a jaeger, yet somehow they are perfect for each other._
> 
> _Baekhyun stops carrying the melody for a split second. “It's true though,” he says, while Chanyeol continues to play along. “I should be a singer, but instead here I am, becoming a martyr with you."_
> 
> _“Would you rather we didn't?”_
> 
> _“And what, go to that midwestern bar you're always thinking about?” Chanyeol blushes. There's never any secrets in the drift. “No,” Baekhyun smiles, and it's soft, and it's endearing, and it's genuine in a way Chanyeol can never be. “I want to save the man I love.”_

“They called us _Baekyeol,_ ” Chanyeol whispers, folding his hands into one another.

“Do you miss it?” she asks.

“I miss _him._ ”

“Then save him. And kill the silence.”

“You know...?”

Moving towards the exit, Sayaka offers no answer. Firmly, she plants her hand on the door, ready to leave, but stops for a second, turning towards Chanyeol.

“I do not know what decision you have been presented with, but,” she says, “I know you will make the right one.”

* * *

“I’ll give it a try.”

It’s still raining, harder than before. Soon, the skies should break and summer will end, leading into a drier fall, but for now it’s the endless, blurring coastline that calls to Chanyeol just outside of the sliding doors. Since the day he arrived on the base, that coastline has taunted him, with its opportunity and sorrow. Today he is going to take it back.

Marshall Kwon smiles at him, beckoning Chanyeol into her office. He steps forward, but remains more distant than he has in the past, so he doesn’t get sucked into old memories.

“I need you to know though, that I’m taking a lot into the drift, and I need someone that can handle it,” he says, firmly. “There’s a lot of risk that someone could get lost in there. And I’m not ready to let just anyone into my head, either. It’s got to be someone that can understand the silence and the fear and the way that Baekhyun is still a part of me. It’s got to be someone that won’t get hurt, because I’m done hurting the people I love.”

“That’s why I chose you Chanyeol,” Marshall Kwon smiles. “It is not vengeance, but an inherent desire to save and to serve that motivates you. Instead of trying to obliterate kaijus for what they’ve taken, you are trying to prevent others from feeling the same loss. It is unique to see this in former pilots, and I think that’s why you are the right choice. As much as you may bring into the drift, there is pain, but also joy, and love; and those that see you will understand the merits of the man that stayed.”

Chanyeol looks to the window, looks to the coast. Feels the brisk draft that eeks through the door brush against his cheeks. Summer in Hong Kong will still lead to fall; then winter; then spring. When spring dawns, the edges of new hope breaking through the crisp air, then maybe he will become sure where his destiny is. Until then he will wait; and he will do what he thinks is right, and maybe…maybe that will have to be enough.

“You made the right choice, Chanyeol,” Marshall Kwon says sweetly. “You will do good, just as you have always done.”

* * *

**Part 2**

“Park Chanyeol, back to throwing punches,” Jongdae announces from the door leading into the kwoon room. He saunters up to Chanyeol and prods at his bicep. “Woah, guess some things never change,” he whistles with a smirk.

Since Chanyeol suddenly decided to give becoming a ranger one last chance, he has begun spending most of his days in the kwoon room, practicing to get back in shape. With Inferno Dawn ready to drop again and Whirlwind Voyager completed, Chanyeol’s responsibilities have depleted greatly, therefore allowing him to take this chance of becoming a pilot again without feeling like he’s leaving behind his technician team. Marshall Kwon has even talked of using some of Wufan’s money to hire a new team of head mechanics to replace him, but Chanyeol isn’t quite ready to leave behind all his responsibilities, so he still spends an hour every morning going through the jaegers and working with the other pilots. The base is so barren now, he only has two teams to work with, so it doesn’t take long. Part of him does miss it though: the long days in the Shatterdome, detached from the world, just working and chatting with his friends.

He knows, though, that this is his last chance; he told himself he will go home, back to Seoul, if this doesn’t play out. Sometimes, at the end of the day, he’s not sure what he wants more: fame, the loud screams of those that he saved, the knowledge that he is doing the best he can to help people, or comfort, the safety of living with Sehun somewhere far from water, knowing that his best friend is safe and able to have some semblance of normalcy in the middle of the apocalypse.

Joonmyun, the fightmaster, shoots Jongdae a pointed look. “I’ll give you a five minute break, but then Chanyeol needs to get back to work.” Chanyeol smiles, before crumpling onto the ground in a pile of long limbs and sweat.

“You okay there, buddy?” Jongdae asks, looking down on his friend.

“Ugh,” is all Chanyeol manages to get out, which he follows with a series of other painful moans. “I thought I still had the body for this, but I guess three years can really soften you up,” he finally says.

Today is a quieter day in the kwoon room: Yixing and Minseok managed to take down a Category II with no assistance yesterday, so they have the day off; Sayaka and Sae have returned to Nagasaki for the week to sort out some affairs, as their stay at Hong Kong had been extended by another month in order to bulk up the base’s defensive options; and Jiho and his team were busy sketching out some new gadgets to add to Hellfire Sigma, in order to arm it better for Category IV’s, and, god forbid, V’s. As a result, their training session in the morning was short and to the point.

Which left Chanyeol.

When Sehun was still dropping, Chanyeol would often practice with him to sharpen his skills. Sehun, unfortunately, had always been a slight step behind Zitao, not a child prodigy in the same way, so he needed sometimes a little push to help him achieve his potential. Those sessions were typically short, because on the inside Sehun was still lazy even when trying his best, and consisted mostly of Sehun beating the shit out of Chanyeol for an hour in order to regain some confidence. Chanyeol would balk and cry and complain, but in the end, he never regretted doing it. Besides, it kept him from becoming completely flabby, and that muscle mass always benefitted him whenever he needed to do some basic fighting – like when he visited Wufan over a month ago.

Of course, that was then, and this is now. Chanyeol needs to regain the physical shape he had at age 20, instead of staying in shape just enough to beat up some overweight lackeys, which isn’t an easy feat. Not that Chanyeol’s old: at 24, he’s a solid young man, but there’s something about the endless energy he once had that he misses. It used to be that he and Baekhyun could practice all day, knocking out teams left and right, and then still go out for dinner and maybe even a few drinks, and then stay up all night, and still be in the kwoon room at seven o’clock sharp for another day of practice.

Now, not so much: Chanyeol is often so tired by the end of the day he skips dinner and sleeps until he can drag himself out of bed in time for Joonmyun to start politely, but very sincerely, telling him to get his ass in gear.

“Come to dinner tonight,” Jongdae asks as he plops himself down alongside Chanyeol. “There new recruits are going to start coming in tomorrow for tryouts on Saturday, and they’re definitely going to take all the good puddings and foods. Besides, Sehun brought Vivi to the base for the week.”

Chanyeol shoots up to sitting. “Vivi? Vivi is coming?”

“I knew the only way to get you to come see us was to use that cute dog,” Jongdae remarks sarcastically. “You’ve been half a ghost. Come on. Eat dinner, play with Vivi, watch a movie. In bed by 10.”

Smiling slightly, Chanyeol nods. “Okay,” he agrees, “but only for Vivi.”

Jongdae punches him on the shoulder, before standing to leave. “Give him your worst, Master Kim,” he announces as he exits, and if Chanyeol knows anything, is that the smile on Joonmyun’s face means he is planning on it.

* * *

“Vivi~” Chanyeol yelps when he comes to dinner and sees Sehun sitting with Vivi, his tiny, white poodle on his lap. “Oh, Vivi!” He immediately picks Vivi up out of his younger friend’s arms and cradles her in his own, and she licks his cheek in response. “I missed you Vivi!”

“Aren’t you allergic to dogs?” Krystal asks as she sits down with her plate. “Like, very allergic?”

“I took so much allergy medicine, I could get stung by a bee and not even feel it,” Chanyeol says. “Just so I can play with this little princess!” He fluffs Vivi’s hair and presses his forehead to hers, and she licks the tip of his nose in response.

“She likes him better than me,” Sehun balks, staring at the spectacle in front of him. “After all this time, she still likes him better than me.”

Kyungsoo waves off Sehun’s bitterness. “So you won’t come to see us, but you will come to see an animal you’re deathly allergic too?”

“Deathly is an overstatement,” Chanyeol responds, placing Vivi in his lap to curl up. “I’m very allergic, not deathly. Painfully, severely, awfully, but not deathly. Would I be able to hold her this close if it was deathly?” He leans over to hover his chin over the dog to demonstrate his argument.

“My point remains.”

Chanyeol runs a hand through his overgrown hair. He has been wearing it in his natural color, black, ever since Baekhyun passed on – it was his old partner that used to style his hair, anyway. He usually kept it closely cropped to his head, however, he hasn’t had time to cut it in months, so it’s growing long and ruthless, becoming wavy from years of damage, perming, and humidity. “It’s rough, training is. It’s tiring.”

Sehun and Minseok scoff. “We would know.”

“I know, I know!” Chanyeol yelps defensively, but all while laughing. Vivi squirms in his lap and settles herself on his arm, which causes him to smile and giggle more. “I thought I did too! I forgot what it’s like. Also – Joonmyun is so much more ruthless than Jinki. It’s not even comparable.”

“Yeah well, duh,” Sehun says.

“Are you excited for tryouts?” Yixing asks.

“Of course,” Chanyeol says, but his voice is edged with some nervousness. In fact, he has been trying not to think about tryouts, the ultimate test of whether or not he is still cut out to be a ranger. Sure, Boa and all those around him have definite faith in him, but he isn’t sure if he’s ready. His training is grueling and makes him feel like a child in the academy again, and he’s worried if it’s because he’s not supposed to go back to piloting.

Besides, there’s also the question of letting someone back in. On Saturday, he will have to fight dozens of recruits in hopes of meeting someone that he will let in his brain. This person will be privy to all that is Park Chanyeol – for better, for worse. This person will see Baekhyun, and understand him fully without ever meeting him, and that makes Chanyeol squirm.

It’s got to be the right person. For Baekhyun, at least.

* * *

In the past, Chanyeol thought he knew nerves. During his first tryouts for the academy with Baekhyun, he remembers how his stomach felt like it was tying itself into a knot that was never meant to be undone, so he broke out into a sweat in the hallway waiting to go into the kwoon room. Or, the night before he and Baekhyun had their first simulator test, he worried he would screw it up so bad and ruin their future, so he crawled into Baekhyun’s bed and listened to him sleep for hours. The next day, Baekhyun said he had been doing the same, and was only pretending to sleep to make Chanyeol feel better, and they laughed and promised never to keep anything from each other again.

The nerves of his first drop, too: he used to think that nothing would ever top that. When Baekhyun and Chanyeol were putting on their suits, the alarm blasting in their ears and the chatter of the different technicians becoming more and more urgent with every second, he remembers the knowledge of their own mortality hitting him so hard he was floored. Chanyeol can never forget the feeling of when he found out that it wasn’t just a game – that he and Baekhyun were going to fight real monsters that could kill them. The feeling in his stomach lurched through his body and he threw up on the way to the connpod, completely unable to control himself. Taeyeon, the old LOCCENT head, stared at him in disbelief.

 

 

> _“Are you sure he has what it takes?” Taeyeon snaps, her mouth ajar. Krystal and Jongdae are sitting at their stations in the LOCCENT center, and Jongdae starts sputtering out excuses; Taeyeon holds out a firm hand to quiet him. “I didn’t ask you, I asked Marshall Kwon.”_
> 
> _“Yes,” Marshall Kwon says, and she looks Chanyeol in the eyes. He knows she can see his red face, and the smear of vomit on his chin, but she looks so sure that it instantly soothes his stomach._
> 
> _“We’ve got this, you know,” Baekhyun reassures him, placing a hand on his back. “If there’s anyone that can do this, it’s me, because when I’m with you I’m confident. Now believe in me. Because seeing you throw up makes me think that you don’t trust me, and I’ll be damned if I’m not better at this than you are.”_
> 
> _Chanyeol laughs, and Baekhyun laughs too, and he knows with the faith of everyone around him, he can do it. Mostly, he knows Baekhyun can do it, and that’s enough._

Now, though: now he knows that the nerves of the first training session have got nothing on the nerves of the second.

It’s not as flooring as his first drop, but he feels his stomach twisting into insane knots, and he doesn’t have anyone to share his fears with, either. He’s been trying to keep Kyungsoo and Sehun out of his training, because he knows they see right through him; Jongdae, meanwhile, would just turn into the soft, jiggly mess that thinks Chanyeol can’t handle reality; and Yixing and Minseok are so busy fighting their own battles, they can’t be involved in his. Instead, Chanyeol let his anxiety stew, but as he walks over to the kwoon room on Saturday morning, he feels like he’s walking to his own personal judgement day.

What if, after all this time, he’s not that Park Chanyeol anymore? What if he really has faded into obscurity, and he’s about to have his ass kicked by a bunch of fit nineteen year olds fresh out of the academy, completely unburdened by the five years of stress he’s been carrying?

His stomach lurches, and he tries to hold himself together as he stands at the threshold of the kwoon room. There are voices, which he attributes to Joonmyun, the fightmaster, and Marshall Kwon, and perhaps a third one – it sounds kind of like Zitao, which makes him nervous again, because where there’s smoke, there’s Sehun, and he doesn’t want Sehun to watch him fail.

With a deep breath, he pushes past the door and walks in. He’s right: it’s Joonmyun, Marshall Kwon, and Zitao standing at the edge of the room.

“Look who decided to show up,” Marshall Kwon announces, her voice stronger and less comforting than usual.

“He’s just on time, actually,” Joonmyun responds. “But we haven’t time to waste. Zitao, can you go get the first recruit?”

Zitao nods, and scuttles out the door.

“Why is Zitao here?” Chanyeol asks, fervently. “I thought it would just be us.”

“Zitao has had multiple partners, so he’s good at picking out post-drift compatibility. Now, no time to waste, Park. If you can’t handle the spotlight, you shouldn’t have agreed to do this again. Shoes off, no time for warmup,” Boa commands, and Chanyeol balks underneath her fierce gaze. This isn’t the woman that constantly coddled him in the past: it’s the same Marshall Kwon that picked out recruits from the academy with a prudish sense and no tolerance for bullshit.

Joonmyun looks to Marshall Kwon, and then back to Chanyeol, inclining his head slightly to indicate that it is, in fact, time to get started. Nervously, Chanyeol slips his shoes off and grabs a prop to fight with. He stands at the edge of the mat, and Zitao brings in the first recruit, a small young girl with long, black hair twisted into a high ponytail and a slight, but relatively tall build.

“Park Sooyoung,” Zitao announces. “Twenty, from Seoul, graduated from the academy eight months ago. Partner failed medical clearance five months ago; she passed. Sooyoung has been working in K-Science since she arrived at the base.”

Upon second look, Chanyeol recognizes her: he has seen her talking to Kyungsoo on occasion. She bows and steps onto the mat, and he returns the favor, before assuming their positions.

Their fight is brief, though strenuous: Joy is stronger and more down to earth than he is, so she is easily able to knock Chanyeol off balance in her first few moves. However, he has more experience working with his own flaws, so after a few rounds of warm up he finds himself easily scoring points on her, as she is not as lightly agile as he is, nor is she as much of a forward-thinker.  As she gets more flustered, he quickly finds holes in her defense that are easy to exploit – she struggles with guarding her back and waist, and, whenever she is knocked to the ground, she fails to properly protect herself while she is standing up. The match ends six to three, in Chanyeol’s favor, though he scores his last four points without a move edgewise from Sooyoung.

After the fight, Sooyoung smiles, and bows, which Chanyeol reciprocates graciously. He feels looser and more in his element after the few brief rounds, which steadies him further. Zitao continues to bring in new recruits, most of them quite young – often nineteen or twenty, four or five years Chanyeol’s junior. Jaebum, who is twenty three, gives him the most trouble, but mostly because he fights with such enthusiasm and fervor that it makes Chanyeol afraid that he might kick him in the nuts at any given moment.

Most fights last fifteen minutes, a few ten, even fewer twenty. After the tenth recruit, Chanyeol is beginning to feel like he did all those years ago when he and Baekhyun would practice, his muscles warm and his brain entering that blissful space where all that matters is the fight, his thoughts dispersing for a clarity unrivaled. Even better, he starts picking up on his own flaws: he often leaves his head wide open to be hit, and his stance is too narrow whenever he falls off balance.

He’s feeling good. Maybe he is still cut out for this.

A few times he steals a look to see if Joonmyun and Boa are approving. Joonmyun’s face is almost permanently settled into this genial aspect that betrays nothing, but every once in a while his mouth quirks ever so slightly upward that Chanyeol knows he just did something good. Zitao is smiling and laughing along, thanking the trainees and making the occasional comment – “Wow,” he might say when Chanyeol manages to dodge a firm hit, or “Tsk,” whenever he leaves himself unguarded. Marshall Kwon, though, remains firm: she neither smiles nor frowns, and wears her lips tightly pressed together.

Chanyeol wants her approval the most, too. Joonmyun is judging his fighting, which Chanyeol knows is good, and Zitao is just judging the spectacle, which is fun regardless. But Marshall Kwon is judging Chanyeol for Chanyeol, since she knows who he was and who he’s become. He wants her to say it’s enough, and with every minute of silence he worries more that he isn’t.

By midday, Chanyeol has been fighting for four hours, and the fatigue is catching up to him. They’ve gone through twenty recruits, almost all of them equally as dismal. No one fights with Chanyeol the way Chanyeol needs, and every match tends to go the same. By the end of the day, he wins almost every round seven or eight to zero, maybe one, never two.

“Last trainee,” Zitao says as he passes Chanyeol. “Then you’re free to rest,” he adds with a giggle.

Chanyeol collapses on the mat. He’s not exhausted, but a few of his partners got in some really hard jabs that he can already feel bruising, especially that Jaebum kid. He rubs a sore shoulder and rolls his head from side to side. For better or worse, this last match means rest, even if it probably also means that Chanyeol hasn’t found one person he can drift with. The first girl, Sooyoung, is probably the closest he has to a match, but even then she seems too green to drop already; Jaebum is an option, but they would probably kill each other on the mat before they reached the connpod. He’s only doing this because of the urgency of the situation, so to have to stall for another few months to prep a trainee would only put the base in greater danger.

Zitao strides in with another tall boy trailing behind him. “Kim Jongin. Twenty-two, from Seoul, graduated from the academy three years ago with partner Oh Sehun. Worked at the Seoul Ballet Academy for the past two years, and a new addition to the base.”

From behind Zitao, Jongin peeks out his head and looks at Chanyeol from underneath his shaggy bangs. His mouth quirks into a smile, but then quickly settles back into a frown when he sees Chanyeol’s aspect.

“Jongin?” Chanyeol asks, his face betraying his confusion. He looks to Joonmyun, Marshall Kwon, and Zitao, who all nod.

“He’s trained, he’s strong, he’s not injured – he’s good, Chanyeol,” Joonmyun notes. “Plus, you get along with Sehun, and he was compatible with Sehun, so there more potential for drift compatibility between you two.”

“Look, I-” Chanyeol starts, before looking at Jongin’s downtrodden face. He likes the boy, more than anyone else in who had trained with him, and that’s why he doesn’t want him inside his head. “Can I have a minute, Marshall Kwon?”

Marshall Kwon tilts up her head, and looks to Joonmyun, giving him a small nod. “Just one, Park.”

They step outside the training room, Marshall Kwon’s kitten heels clicking on the cement floors, sending ominous echoes through the hallway. Hypothetically, there should be tons of students milling in the hall, waiting to hear the results of the test; but Chanyeol isn’t a superstar anymore, and what once would have brought excitement to the Shatterdome now only brought dread.

“I can’t drift with Jongin,” Chanyeol states, running a hand through his sweaty hair. “He’s too – too personal.”

“You barely know him, Park,” Chanyeol notes how Marshall Kwon isn’t calling him by his first name – which is alienating, and confusing, “he only arrived a month ago. Besides, you drift better with those you get along with.”

“I just – I can’t, I can’t do it. He’s too close – I look at him and he knew Park Chanyeol back when I was that Park Chanyeol, and I’m not anymore, and he knows who I am with Sehun, and there’s this huge gap of who I am and who I want to be, and who I was, and I really – I don’t want him to know that gap.”

“You’re being childish, Park,” Marshall Kwon responds. “This isn’t about your secrets getting out; this is about saving the world. A person like you understands that a ranger’s life is on display – you should know what that means by now.”

“Boa, I just-”

“Marshall Kwon,” she snaps back, her voice icy, and Chanyeol realizes then that all his years of special treatment and babying were gone. He has made his decision, and he’s not Park Chanyeol, the boy who stayed, the lost puppy; he’s just Park Chanyeol, and this is his last shot, and if not – he’s got to go.

“Marshall Kwon,” he says, solemnly. “There’s a lot to lose with Jongin, and I don’t really feel comfortable with him knowing about Baekhyun and my parents yet.”

“There’s too much to lose for you to play these games anymore. You’ve made up your mind Park, and I hope that when you told me you’d try you meant it. This isn’t a drift test, it’s just a basic match, to test compatibility. He’s not going to see your dreams; we’re just going to see if you guys can fight.”

He hesitates, but he realizes he has no choice. “Ok,” Chanyeol sighs.

“Now get back in there, and prove to me that I haven’t misplaced my faith.” Marshall Kwon turns on her heel and clicks back into the kwoon room, leaving Chanyeol in her wake.

_Red and blue and grey…I’ll always love you…I’m sure you’ll make the right one…_

_No_ , Chanyeol thinks. It’s not the time to get lost in memories. Strongly, he straightens his posture and reenters the kwoon room, where Marshall Kwon, Zitao, Joonmyun, Jongin, and about fifteen other trainees are looking at him expectantly.

Part of him recoils at the attention, but part of him revels in it. It’s hard; he’s not sure what he wants.

Jongin is waiting on the mat, leaning on his stick lazily, but Chanyeol quickly assesses that for all Jongin’s slouchy posture and seemingly half-hearted movement, he is strong and calculating, so the laidback façade is a ruse.

Suddenly, he feels slightly closer to the boy.

Chanyeol steps up to the mat, bows to Jongin, and assumes his fighting position; his go-to stance has one leg back, with his stick clutched behind him in his lower arm, and his left arm extended forward. He tries to keep his limbs, ever gangly, tight to his core, and steady himself; he knows that Jongin, who is slightly shorter and broader than himself, will try to attack his balance first.

He nods, and Jongin lunges forward, sweeping his stick below, aiming for Chanyeol’s hip; in response, he twists to his right, sending his stick around, and hits Jongin firmly on the shoulder.

“One to zero,” Joonmyun calls out.

“That was careless,” Chanyeol lectures as he waits for Jongin to move. In a flash, Jongin leaps to the side, spins his stick into his other arm, and aims for Chanyeol’s neck; in response, the older boy dips below, but feels himself quickly lose his balance, and rolls to the side. Overhead, Jongin leaps, and Chanyeol rolls again; when the brown-haired boy lands, Chanyeol drags his left leg, knocking Jongin to the ground, before shifting himself up to his other knee, and knocking Jongin in the shoulder again.

“Two to zero,” Joonmyun announces.

Even though he’s ahead, Chanyeol’s already out of breath; Jongin is quick on his feet and his movements are languid, flowing easily from one to another, lacking the choppiness of the other recruits and, in fact, quite similar to Baekhyun’s style, albeit more intense, more passionate. In the past, Chanyeol has thought of himself as rather strong; after his initial struggle with depression, he quickly returned to training even when he thought he was never going to pilot again. During the past few years, he consistently made an effort to train; to an extent, he hasn’t been pushed hard, but he has maintained a level of fitness slightly below the average pilot, which he assumed was good enough.

It isn’t.

“I’m just warming up,” Jongin grits out through clenched teeth. He jumps to standing, which impresses Chanyeol immediately; it takes major core strength to pull that off – something he himself doesn’t have.

When Jongin doesn’t offer to make the first move, Chanyeol does: he reaches for Jongin’s left shoulder, but, the boy immediately dodges, sweeping beneath Chanyeol’s outstretched arm and moving towards his backside. He twists behind him like a dancer, leaving Chanyeol with too much of his weight forward, and nabs a knee into the taller boys’ hip, sending him falling face first to the mat. He thrusts out his stick, but Chanyeol rolls to the side, and plants his arms to the ground, springing himself back to his feet. Jongin, on his knees, thrusts out a leg and a stick, aiming to hit Chanyeol on the leg, but Chanyeol quickly blocks it, and, using his needlessly long arms, manages to grab Jongin’s wrist. Jongin quickly pulls his bodyweight to the side, and Chanyeol loses his grip again, but he backs up cautiously rather than over extend himself – that’s what Jongin wants.

Quickly, Chanyeol retreats back to his firm standing pose, but Jongin remains low, with the balls of his feet firm on the ground but his heels lifted. He springs upwards, and as Chanyeol moves to dodge below, Jongin twists around and lands his stick square between Chanyeol’s shoulder blades.

“Two to one,” Joonmyun announces. When Chanyeol looks up to his row of spectators, he sees the smallest smile forming on Marshall Kwon’s face.

With a sweaty palm, he wipes his brow and assumes his stance. “It’s been a while since I’ve lost, and that’s not changing today,” Chanyeol calls out. Slyly, he beckons Jongin with his open hand.

In response, Jongin lunges forward.

* * *

“I heard you and Jongin hit it off.”

Chanyeol looks up from his bottom bunk to see Sehun’s head peeking through his door, sporting his classic smirk, with Vivi in his arms. Rolling his eyes, he motions for the younger ranger to enter, and shuffles the items in his hands to the side

“You could say that, yeah,” Chanyeol responds, smiling slightly. Sehun sits beside him, but his weight barely imprints the bed; he’s gotten thinner since being in the hospital bays, though he has never been a particularly husky boy. Rather, he is lean and agile, with a set of broad, firm shoulders, even moreso than Chanyeol. As the weight rolled off, though, his muscle mass did too and he has become more akin to a gaunt ghost, haunting the halls, a husk of the confident ranger that used to swagger around the cafeteria.

“Give him a chance,” Sehun says, before moving to lay down. Vivi leaps out of Sehun’s arms and into Chanyeol’s lap, much to Chanyeol’s delight. “He’s really good, you know. And he really likes you.”

“He does?”

“I mean, obviously; when someone tries as hard as you do, everyone kind of likes you.”

“Shut up,” Chanyeol yelps, shoving Sehun, who easily flips over. Vivi yips in response, before jumping away from her owner and closer to Chanyeol. He chuckles. “I am not a try hard. I’m just likeable. Your dog likes me better than you, and I’m allergic to her.”

Sehun rolls his eyes. “You’re the definition of tryhard. You and Baekhyun.”

“Yeah, well, at least I’m not lazy, like a certain person,” Chanyeol quips back, giving Sehun one of his iconic mock-angry faces.

“You’re a try hard and you’re lazy,” Sehun drawls out. “See, I’m an icon of determination.” He looks down at Vivi. “Vivi, come here. Come to papa.” The puppy looks up at Sehun, cocks her head to the side, and then moves closer to Chanyeol. They both burst into laughter. “As if,” Sehun admits, before rolling back to his other side.

When they quiet, Sehun gives Chanyeol a pointed look.

“What?” the older boy asks. “Have you finally fallen in love with me? I know I am handsome.”

“Ew,” Sehun responds. “No, I don’t think I could ever love someone that looks the way you do when you laugh.”

“Then what gives?”

“Do you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“You’re going to pilot again?” Sehun asks, his voice suddenly turning meek.

Chanyeol recoils, feeling hesitant. It’s weird getting grilled by Marshall Kwon about something like this, but having Sehun – someone so easygoing and childish – question his motives, he begins to wonder if he’s as transparent as everyone seems to think he is.

“I haven’t really thought about it, you know,” he says at length. “I figured, well, if I make it to a jaeger, then I make it to a jaeger.”

“That’s not a good attitude,” Sehun says. “People are counting on you.”

“Jeez, even you’re doing this?” Chanyeol snaps back.

“I’m a pilot,” Sehun says.

“You were.”

“Sometimes I think all of the Baekhyun is out of your system and then you say something like that.”

“Stop bringing up Baekhyun.”

“You’re not going to pilot if you’re still in love with him.”

“Who are you?” Chanyeol snaps. “I’m friends with you because you don’t do these things.”

“I don’t know,” Sehun says. “But I care about Jongin, and he wants this, and the base needs this. You’re both my friends but I don’t want to be here forever waiting for you to decide what you want.”

“Seriously, I…”

“I want to go home, Chanyeol,” Sehun interrupts him. “I want to be normal, date a normal person, go to school, get a degree. I loved being a ranger, but it’s over and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life here, wishing to be able to protect people that I physically can’t anymore. But I don’t want to leave until I know you’re coming with me.”

Chanyeol quiets. “Are you sure you’re not in love with me?”

Sehun pushes him, and they descend into laughter.

“I made my choice, Sehun,” Chanyeol says, once they calm down. “I’m going home with you if this doesn’t work out. I’m sure.”

“You promise?” Sehun asks, his voice small, almost childish. Chanyeol rarely sees this side of his friend, even in all the years he’s known him. It pains a part of Chanyeol that knows that Sehun deserves something, in spite of it all.

“I promise,” he responds, and he means it, more than anything else. The only promise of stability in his life is this future with Sehun, and for once he needs to bet on something that can follow through.

* * *

 

 

 

> _I love you, oh yes I do, I love you…I want to save the man I love…maybe, someday, when the sun shines again..._

First, he’s on the beach, basked in sun, and then there’s a blinding light that eclipses any promise, and then he awakes, in his room, alone, drenched in sweat, just like every night before.

* * *

Given the day off, Chanyeol spends most of Sunday in his room, strumming his guitar. He has breakfast in the morning and helps an ever frailer Sehun walk Vivi, but otherwise he’s far too tired to do much else. Though he had fought with ease on Saturday, not losing a single match – including to Jongin – his limbs feel like jello and he essentially has become a walking bruise, sore in spots he doesn’t even remember being hit in. He thinks about calling his sister, but he’s worried that she will disapprove of his choice to pilot again – she, of course, has been hurt just as much by tragedy as he. And what is the point of telling her, he wonders, if none of it will come to fruition? Saying aimless things will worry her, and though he is often terrible at keeping his mouth shut, for once he decides to be prudent with his words.

Around one in the afternoon, Chanyeol is greeted with a knock at the door, courtesy of K-Science member and Marshall Kwon’s personal secretary, Sunyoung.

“Hello, Ranger Park,” she says with a smile. He notes that she didn’t use his usual name, Officer Park, or even Engineer Park, which she used to use to address him in technical meetings. “Marshall Kwon needs to speak with you.”

Nodding, he follows Sunyoung out into the hall, and closes the door behind him. They engage in aimless small talk; he asks how her day has been, and when her next break is. Sunyoung is the kind of person who smiles with such ease she radiates a bountiful, bright energy, and yet, Chanyeol cannot get the nerves in his stomach to settle, even with her reassuring presence.

This is it, isn’t it?

“Are you nervous, Ranger Park?” she asks, as they round the corner to the Marshall’s hall.

He laughs. “I do one training session, and I’m no longer Officer Park?”

Smiling, she inclines her head ever so slightly. “Weren’t you always Ranger Park? You only joined J-Tech a few years ago.”

He chuckles, a grin inching on his face. There’s no secrets on the base, and he forgets that with the degree of notoriety he has, there is seldom a person who worked on the base as long as Sunyoung has without knowing all the secrets he tries to keep hidden. Especially since Sunyoung is Marshall Kwon’s assistant, who has been privy to every matter the commander handles.

 _Especially since_ he was once the person that was used to recruit pilots, the golden boy who persevered on the base for half a decade, the image they plastered in the city. He once was Ranger Park, not Officer Park, not Chanyeol, not anything he has become. And yet to hear it again, the name he clamored to achieve, feels foreign on his ears, like a language from a home he knows he cannot go back to.

“You’re right, I guess,” he responds. “With comfort though. I should embrace Ranger, since I might become one again.”

“You are a Ranger,” she says confidently, “you never stopped being one.” Sunyoung opens the door for Chanyeol, and leans into the Marshall’s suite. “Ranger Park is here,” she announces, and brushes past Chanyeol. As she exits, she leans in, “Don’t ever doubt the merits of the team that saved Seoul.” Gently, she pats Chanyeol on the shoulder before disappearing into the hall. In his chest, Chanyeol feels a well of something – pride? anxiety? fear? – that he hasn’t felt in a while.

“Chanyeol,” Marshall Kwon says, her face looking softer than usual. She removes her glasses. “Make yourself comfortable.”

“Since you’re calling me Chanyeol, is this a personal call?” he asks as he moves to sit down. The chair is uncomfortable, squeaky and strange, but after all these years he’s grown accustomed to the feeling. It’s off-beat and far from desirable, but it’s familiar.

Marshall Kwon grins. “This part of our meeting will be personal, but then we will move onto official business. Do you prefer Officer Park now, after all these years? You used to physically recoil when I called you that.”

“No,” he says, chuckling.

“Good,” she says. Neatly, she folds her hands in her lap and looks out the window. It’s not raining today, Chanyeol notes, though the sun has yet to break through the clouds. He’s sure it feels muggy and hot outside, but this part of the base is eternally cool, brisk from the currents sweeping the air from the Shatterdome around the halls. “I think you know why you’re here.”

“I don’t,” Chanyeol responds.

“I’ve chosen your partner.”

“Already?”

“Yes,” she nods. “I think you know who it is.”

Chanyeol looks at Boa in the eyes, and know that she’s right – he does. There is no one else it could be, in fact. The day he spent fighting in the kwoon room was riddled with disappointment, dozens of trainees that gave their all but didn’t click with Chanyeol. Their fights were desperate, with hands flying and limbs catching, but they didn’t have the grace and ease that promised drift compatibility. To be drift compatible was to fight: to anticipate your opponent’s steps, to feel their weakness, and to move in a fluid motion that eased back and forth, pulling in and out like the tides. It was to lose and to win; to fall down, and get back up.

While his fight with Jongin was by no means poetic, it did have the promise of a ballet dance, with movements that flowed from one to another. Chanyeol can already see the way Jongin could teach him to be a better fighter. Jongin is probably more physically talented than Chanyeol in a thousand ways, he just doesn’t know how to fight to win yet. Winning, well, Chanyeol knows how to do that: how to fight without reserve or regard, to fight to save.

“Kim Jongin,” Chanyeol says quietly. “There’s no one else it could be.”

“Yes,” Boa responds. “You two…your fight did not have the inherent grace that you and Baekhyun had, but it had potential that I have not seen in years. For two almost strangers to be able to fight like that; to pick up so quickly on each other’s strengths and weaknesses, to so easily move into the dance? I think there is promise in that. A promise that could save the world.”

Chanyeol looks to the Marshall. On days like today, she is his friend: the woman he grew up with, who he always admired. Out in the hallway, though, he thinks of how ruthlessly she tore down his indecision and fear; maybe, though, that’s what he needs.

Today she is Boa, and not Marshall Kwon, and Boa understands better than anyone else what he has been through. She maneuvers this space with ease, turning from one to another, friend to commander, and sometimes it gives Chanyeol whiplash, but just as often it fills him with admiration. They all have personas to put on. He likes that she can take hers off.

“I’m nervous,” he admits. “I haven’t…I haven’t let anyone in my head since Baekhyun. I feel like it’s almost unfair to drift with someone he didn’t know, because they drift with him.” He sighs, folding his hands neatly in his lap, reclining in the uncomfortable chair with ease. “There’s a lot of myself that I know isn’t necessarily what it seems. You get that, and Sehun does, and Kyungsoo does, but many people don’t. Jongin sees me as Ranger Park Chanyeol, who saved Seoul, and I don’t know if I can drift with him and watch that image shatter, because it might shatter inside me too. For all the good I’ve done, I’ve ruined so much too, and…I want to be good, and I don’t want him to know I’m not.”

Boa extends an arm, and grabs Chanyeol’s hand. “It can’t shatter because it never did. You are good, and you always have been. I don’t think you would have said yes if you didn’t want this. I’ve never met anyone more self-assured than you.”

“I can’t tell if I want it, or if I just want to be told I’m a hero again. I really don’t know. Is this my only chance at redemption for everything I’ve done?”

“Is there a problem in it being either?” she quickly responds. “To be a hero is to be a ranger, so to want to be told you’re a hero again is to want to be told you’re a ranger again, Ranger Park.” She squeezes his palm. “I know you’ve made your choice, but I will give you one last chance to back out. Right now. You back out, and we say we haven’t found anyone compatible, and it’s over.”

He sighs, and feels the pit in his chest. He listens for the rain, the tides, for something; but they’re gone. The sky is grey and heavy, murky in late evening, but it is not raining, and the coast line is clear, for the first time in months. Summer will break. Summer will break within a few weeks, and then the rain will stop, and it will all be over. And what does he do when the sun breaks? Keep waiting? Leave, with Sehun, to go away? And watch the base, his own home, his only home, fall to shambles? Leave the ghosts he created to wander forever, as he escapes to temporary safety?

He looks up, meets the eyes of the woman he once loved. Deep, brown eyes; they almost weighed on her, they were so full and endless.

“I’m ready.”

Marshall Kwon smiles, and leans in to hug Chanyeol. He feels the warmth of another, and it’s strange, distant, something he hasn’t felt in a while; it’s as if every time he is gifted with human contact, his body doesn’t know how to remember it. All the same, Marshall Kwon’s body is familiar and honest, the embrace one that he has felt many times before, and if anything can calm him now it’s the knowledge that not everything has changed forever.

* * *

That night, Chanyeol sleeps restlessly, his heart pounding in his chest. Oscillating between feverishly hot and chillingly cold, he thrashes about in bed, images pulsing through his head of days gone by. Of Baekhyun, and of his parents, of Shore Lucky, of a tempest. Of sunny days that always turn to rain, of coastlines that stretch for dangerous miles.

“I’m scared, Baekhyun,” he finds himself saying to the ceiling, even though Baekhyun isn’t there. To admit anything to Sehun is to admit it to Jongin, and to admit anything to Kyungsoo is to make it real. He misses Baekhyun so intensely it floors him right then. There’s the same pit in his stomach the day that he threw up as they entered the connpod, but he doesn’t have Baekhyun’s reassuring arm to hold him over.

Where does he go when he’s supposed to be the strong one?

“I think about that day every day, every single day, every night. It’s always there. And I think about my parents, and I think about…so much…” he trails off, and then buries his face in his hands. “But this is the first time it will be there, right there, and I don’t know…if I can keep myself afloat when I have to relive it.”

In the past, he protected Baekhyun physically, because he was taller and stronger, but now he needs Baekhyun’s reassuring laugh. He needs Baekhyun’s sense of humor. Stirring, he crosses the room to take one of the sleeping pills the base psychiatrist had prescribed him years ago. In the beginning, he rarely took them – when he was a ranger, he couldn’t take them since they would incapacitate him for too long. In the wake of Baekhyun’s death, he started taking them again, but weaned off when he found them bringing him deeper into the trenches of his memory. Like a zombie, he taps the bottle on his hand, only to see fewer pills spill out then he remembered.

Ah; he had already taken them tonight, which explained the more vivid than usual dreams. Apprehensively, he pours all but one of the capsules back into the bottle, before impulsively swallowing the last one.

 _“Let him in,”_ says the echo of a memory, but it fades almost immediately. Whatever he is looking for, he hopes to find. He wonders if in the drift, the sacred space he has only shared with Baekhyun, he will be able to find the warmth of the memory of the embraces they shared, of his beautiful hands tracing the lines of his back, of his voice calming him to sleep.

He’s terrified; Chanyeol can admit that. In the drift lies his worst memories, his biggest fears, and a truth he can’t admit; but in the drift he is closer than he has ever been to Baekhyun, and maybe that’s the comfort he needs now.

“Forgive me,” he begs, to nothing at all, before crawling into bed again. He thinks of Sehun, he thinks of Jongin, he thinks of Baekhyun; he thinks of everything, and nothing at all, the sweat drying cool, sticky on his skin, and drifts again to a fitful sleep.

* * *

There’s a formal announcement, of course. Marshall Kwon had informed Chanyeol about it all, but he hasn’t forgotten the technicalities of designing a new jaeger team, even after all these years. As a Commanding Officer with J-Tech, he used to live for these announcements, since they would push him elbow-deep into the mechanics of the robots, learning to fit a jaeger to a team, designing weapons and tweaking wires so that the jaeger could meld with the partners in the drift, three becoming one.

Lest he forget, he’s already had the excitement of becoming the next jaeger pilot. It’s different though, this time. Since nobody is quite sure if he and Jongin will be 100% compatible, the first announcement will be a small, intimate one, only with the most vital members of the base who will be working to design the cachets of their jaeger. They will work together to train and fit the jaeger, with regular simulator tests, leading up to their first drift compatibility test in one month. Most teams do a practice drift within a week of training post-academy, but, most teams aren’t composed of almost strangers, let alone someone as damaged as Chanyeol. Zitao and Sehun took three months to do their first drift test, so it’s not unheard of to wait it out.

Everything that comes after is contingent on an if, so Chanyeol is trying not to think about it. If, if, _if_ they pass the drift compatibility test, then they will need to drift again with their jaeger; then, given all signs go, they will do a couple more weeks of training and probably be ready to drop by the end of the year, in about 10 weeks or so. When everything is sure, there will be a big TV announcement and a press conference where the new team is announced to the world. Marshall Kwon clearly is planning to play up the fact that it is Park Chanyeol’s redemption team, and Chanyeol knows he will be certainly put on talk shows, perhaps even given a press tour…but all that is contingent on an “if,” an “ _if_ ” he isn’t sure he wants.

So, for now, as he strides down the hall to the kwoon room, ready for the first round of official announcement, Chanyeol decides he will focus on making it through the day. And the next day. And the next day. Until eventually, the tides pull one way or another.

As he approaches the kwoon room, the reality of the situation sets in. _This is it._ He has made his choice, and now he’s not just Officer Park, formerly Ranger Park. He’s digging his hands into another adventure and he’s putting himself back out in the world, where perhaps he isn’t so safe. It’s risky. And it’s with someone that doesn’t know the real him: a boy that idolized a man without realizing what lies beneath the surface.

He takes a deep breath, his hand on the door. It’s the beginning of a new adventure, the chapter of redemption in his life. Or it could be his demise.

_I’m sure it will be the right one._

Swinging the door open, Chanyeol sees Marshall Kwon, Joonmyun and Zitao standing at the front of the room, with Sehun off to the side petting Vivi, a row of J-Tech engineers and LOCCENT officers, including Sunyoung, in the corner of the room, and Jongin facing his superiors, back turned, unaware of Chanyeol’s presence.

“So is Vivi our new base pet?” Chanyeol asks as he enters the room, all fake bravado that he has managed to drum up in a matter of seconds.

Jongin turns to Chanyeol, and then his face lights up immediately. “Chanyeol,” he calls out, and he moves his body to face the former pilot.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Chanyeol adds, before moving towards Sehun and reaching down to pet Vivi. He immediately sneezes, which causes Sehun to laugh.

“My poodle can kill you,” Sehun taunts, holding on to his puppy as she tries to crawl out of his arms towards Chanyeol. “My poodle can kill the great Park Chanyeol.”

Chanyeol pouts. “I forgot my allergy medicine. Besides, I didn’t know the base pet could have its own pet.” He shoots a comical glare at Sehun.

“Are you calling me the base pet?” Sehun balks, frowning. “I am not the base pet.”

“What else do you do?” Chanyeol snaps, before sticking his tongue out at Sehun. Sehun sticks his tongue back out in response, and Jongin watches the whole exchange with a strange, detached bemusement that makes Chanyeol a little uncomfortable. Regardless, Jongin is his new partner, and he has to make an effort to make him feel at home, so, with one last pat for Vivi and one last sneeze, Chanyeol moves over to stand beside Jongin and places a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“This is really happening?” he asks, and Chanyeol smiles and nods.

“Yeah, it is.”

Marshall Kwon coughs, and the two boys look up at their superiors. Despite her concentrated attempts at being the Marshall Kwon today, and not Boa, the slight grin that graces her lips informs Chanyeol that the woman that sat him in her office earlier is in there. And she is excited.

“Usually there is a certain level of formality with these announcements,” she begins, “but I guess there is very little left to the imagination at this point. Kim Jongin, you have been selected to train with Park Chanyeol for the next few weeks.” Chanyeol feels a surge of excitement run through his partner’s body, from the way Jongin tenses up ever so slightly. “For one month, you will train together and live together, in hopes of creating a bond that will survive the drift.” Marshall Kwon inclines her head towards fightmaster Joonmyun, who takes over next.

“I will be training both of you to fit to each other’s styles. As both of you have had partners in the past,” his eyes flicker to Sehun, in the corner, but the young man is playing with his puppy, completely unaware, “it will be both easier and more difficult to make the fit. Training will begin every day at 5AM, with a two hour lunch break and a three hour afternoon session, ending at 4PM. You get a half day every fifth day and a day off every seventh day.” Joonmyun steps back, and looks to Zitao.

“And I, well,” Zitao says, his lips quirked in a slight, self-critical smirk, “I’m the master of second partners. I’m going to be here if you guys have any specific questions. I’ll do the half day training session with you, and we can work on some foundations. Sehun might even join us.” Zitao offers a warm smile across the room to his former partner, who returns it gleefully.

“Well, that will be all, then,” Marshall Kwon moves to dismiss everyone, but Chanyeol steps forward.

“Wait,” Chanyeol asks. “Since I’m still a part of J-Tech, I want say in how our jaeger will be fitted, and naming it. I’m pretty sure Whirlwind Voyager is ready to go, but I don’t know if it’s the right fit for us. I know it’s a bit early, but I still need to know so I can delegate tasks properly during my phase out. Who’s our jaeger going to be? I don’t think we have time to build a new one, so will we refurbish one of the out of order ones?”

Marshall Kwon inhales sharply, and Zitao shoots Sehun a very pointed look across the room. The sudden tense air falls heavy around Chanyeol’s shoulders, and he can’t help but think that something is amiss.

“Your jaeger will be Renegade Tempest,” Marshall Kwon states, and Chanyeol feels his heart leap into his throat. “The new Commanding J-Tech officers are being selected to help with the refurbishment. Parts will be subbed in from various old jaegers, including Shore Lucky.”

_Red and grey and black…_

Renegade Tempest is red and grey and black; tall and sleek and fit, with long, slender arms and fingers that boast a variety of weapons. It is a jaeger built with grace, one of the first Mark III’s, with a strong electric reactor that minimizes radiation. It’s nothing like the Mark IV’s that are being rolled out, but by god – it’s gorgeous.

Or, it was.

Chanyeol had been working on Renegade Tempest for the past few years as a pet project, sneaking parts in and out, until she was good as new. Perhaps it was therapeutic, rebuilding the machine that represented the love of his life, that held together the drift between the two of them, piecing back together every part until he could find an image of a Baekhyun that lived, a tempest that brought peace. You drift with your partner, but you also drift with your jaeger, and after losing Shore Lucky, he couldn’t bring himself to let Renegade be scrapped to make way for the new jaegers, who’s fate would – ultimately – be the same.                                          

Renegade was theirs, and he’d be damned if he watched someone dismantle the machine that had brought him so much joy and so much grief. The days he spent in that jaeger were his life; the Chanyeol that existed before Renegade Tempest was but a child. He had even named her, back in his youth.

 

 

 

> _“You’re a rebel,” Baekhyun teases him._
> 
> _“I am a rebel,” Chanyeol insists back. At but sixteen, he is young and lanky, ever taller than Baekhyun and all his peers, ever skinnier as well. Baekhyun is petite by every definition of the word and infinitely cuter than Chanyeol, whose acne is destroying his skin, with large ears detracting from his handsome face._
> 
> _“You are not,” Baekhyun insists. “I was kidding. You are doing exactly what your parents do.”_
> 
> _“Well, I’m only going to do it if they don’t save the world first. Maybe they will, and then I won’t need to,” Chanyeol snaps back. “But you have to admit, I’ll make an amazing jaeger pilot.”_
> 
> _Baekhyun rolls his head back and forth, swinging his legs off the ledge they are sitting on. “It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”_
> 
> _“It was more dangerous when there weren’t jaegers.”_
> 
> _“I know,” Baekhyun insists. “By why do you have to be the one getting in them?”_
> 
> _“Because I can’t just sit around and wait, Baekhyun. It’s our job to save others if we can, and if I can, but I choose not to, then isn’t that my failure?”_
> 
> _Baekhyun sighs. “You’re not a martyr, you know,” he replies, a frown settling onto his skin. “You’re not handsome enough to be one. They’ll remember you as the dumbo-eared jaeger pilot. Why do that when you could be happy, away from it?”_
> 
> _“Because it’s my duty, Baekhyun,” he says. “There is nothing else that could ever make me happy.”_

Renegade came first, tempest second. Tempest for the storms they weathered, tempest for the storms that robbed them, tempest for the storm they would become. Tempest for the sound of the rain on the roof of the Shatterdome, for the skyline blurring into a downpour that summer five years ago; fitting for the red and grey and black, for the coastline clean and clear now stained with the blood of a promise he couldn’t keep.

 

 

>   _“Renegade Tempest,” Baekhyun says, gazing upon their jaeger for the first time._
> 
> _“Why that?” Chanyeol asks his partner._
> 
> _“We will be the storm that brings peace, instead of destruction,” Baekhyun nods. “A storm that brings a coastline clear and a sunny day, and promise of tomorrow.”_

“Renegade Tempest is Shore Lucky’s daughter, so it is only natural to use Shore Lucky’s parts to finish the refurbishment process,” Marshall Kwon continues. “She’s in amazing condition, as if someone has been servicing her for all these years,” she says, her voice tinged with irony, “and is fit to drop at a moments’ notice. Naturally, you know the layout of Renegade, which will make the drifting process easier, and of course…”

Staring at Marshall Kwon while she mechanically explains why they must get back in the jaeger that he once loved makes Chanyeol’s ears ring with anger to the point that he feels deaf, as if no one could understand. It’s ridiculous – he lost the love of his life out of the left cockpit of that jaeger, and now, he must get back in a relive it, he must fight in the jaeger that he failed in, he must share memories with another man in the jaeger that belonged to him and his lover. And, worst of all, he must fight in his jaeger refurbished with parts of his biggest loss. Watching Shore Lucky get dismantled over the past few years had been so painful, but at least the skeleton of the jaeger had always remained in the bays, watching over him like some futuristic god, eternal even as it’s metals decayed and its reactor was removed. When the sun passes through the bays, creating the golden light, it glints off the hallow shell of Shore Lucky in such a way that maybe, just maybe, Chanyeol can believe in some kind of afterlife, the weight of some kind of everlasting presence that is guiding him to where he is supposed to be, giving reason to the chaotic violence that has taken over his world. Shore Lucky’s old skeleton has been the only thing constant from when he was young to his first drop to the silence, the only thing he hasn’t fully lost, and now…

And now it will be dismantled, for good, to guide him to his own demise. 

“In summary, there is no other way it can be done, as time is short and we are out of other jaegers. Do you understand?” Marshall Kwon finishes, and all eyes in the room turn to Chanyeol: Zitao’s remorseful gaze, Joonmyun’s distant one, Sehun’s worried one, framed against the collection of aghast and mournful aspects of those that he used to work with, all distant from the drama. He feels the weight of Jongin’s eyes against him but can’t turn to look; the confusion and bewilderment he knows the boy must be showing will be too much.

Chanyeol nods, but he is furious and knows that everyone can sense it. “Yes, Marshall,” he says through gritted teeth. “I would expect nothing less. Am I dismissed?”

Sighing, Marshall Kwon looks to Chanyeol, her face etched with regret. “Dismissed.”

* * *

“Start,” Joonmyun announces, overseeing the kwoon room from his usual elevated post.

Jongin lunges forward, and Chanyeol quickly spins around, dodging his attack, leaving Jongin behind and open, just as had happened during their first fight. True to form, he whacks Jongin in the shoulder, one of his weakest points.

“What is that, ten to three?” Chanyeol calls back to Joonmyun, turning away from his partner. 

“Don’t leave your stance,” Joonmyun scolds. “Continuous fighting.” Chanyeol rolls his eyes, but quickly resumes his previous position.

In response, Jongin attempts to sweep Chanyeol off his feet, but Chanyeol easily jumps over another one of the younger boys signature moves. Angered, he jumps to the side, twisting his body around Chanyeol’s, and reaches for Park’s hip; Chanyeol slides out of the grab, leaving Jongin off-balanced and exposed. With a lazy movement, he jabs his stick into the side of Jongin’s waist, flipping the boy to the mat.

“Eleven to three,” Joonmyun sighs.

“Are we done yet?” Chanyeol calls back, shooting a glare at the fightmaster. “He’s making the same mistakes over and over again.”

Joonmyun frowns, which is unbecoming of his almost perpetually genial aspect, before reaching for two towels and throwing them to the boys; Chanyeol fumbles his when he tries to catch it, but Jongin just lets the towel fall flat on his face. “Thirty minutes break. Jongin, rest up. We will do some focused training afterwards.” Quietly, he moves out of the room, but he shoots Chanyeol a pointed look, to which the former pilot simply shrugs.

Looking down, Chanyeol sees Jongin has not moved from his position on the floor.

“Get up,” Chanyeol orders. Jongin moves the towel away from his eyes, finally meeting Chanyeol’s vision. The older boy immediately shies away.

“Why do you hate me all of the sudden?” he asks.

“What?” Chanyeol snaps. “I don’t hate you. I just expected more.”

“No, you do hate me,” Jongin insists, moving up onto his elbows, but still remaining on the mat.

It’s the eighth day of training, and Chanyeol has been growing more and more ruthless with each passing session. Perhaps it’s built up anger, or something else; he can’t explain why, but he just doesn’t have it in him to put up with Jongin. He knows, deep down, that each session is supposed to be akin to a dance – learning your partners strengths and weaknesses in order to put on a show, coming to ebb and flow with each passing blow – but Chanyeol is still viewing it as a fight, and a ruthless one at that. At the end of each day, he is sore, tired, and angry.

Jongin, meanwhile had first taken to Chanyeol’s inexplicable change of tune like a sad puppy, constantly moping and flinching away. Now, though, with time, he has come to become angry too, and Chanyeol can feel it – but anger made his fighting worse, not better, and Chanyeol can see that too. The state of their compatibility is visibly declining, and Chanyeol knows that the only key to reversal is his attitude, but he doesn’t want change.

“I don’t hate you,” Chanyeol insists. “But if you’re not up to par, then you’re not up to par. That’s not my fault.” He begins to move away from the mat, reaching down for his water bottle.

“Work with me then,” Jongin fires back. Chanyeol stops mid-bend. “I don’t have your experience. I haven’t done this in years, because I was out in the real world, not waiting around on the base.” Chanyeol eases back up to standing, but Jongin won’t hold back. “You’re not the only person that’s hungry for revenge. I want to help you, but you need to let me in.”

“That’s enough for today,” Chanyeol responds flatly, yet only to cover up his rising anger. The person he wants to be doesn’t get angry, he thinks. “Rest up.” Silently, he strides out of the room, though he can feel Jongin’s gaze on his back, heavy, sad, unrelenting.

As he begins to march down the hallway, he runs into Joonmyun, who grabs him by the shoulder as he attempts to pass by.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Joonmyun lectures him, pulling on his shoulder in order to turn him around. Sometimes, Chanyeol forgets that in order to be fightmaster, one must be a good fighter; Joonmyun’s grip is so firm and powerful, he feels shaken to the core at the slight gesture.

“I just know what I need in a partner, and Jongin isn’t going to cut it,” he responds, looking his superior in the eye. Though Joonmyun is a solid fifteen centimeters shorter than him, he feels dwarfed by his disappointed gaze. Joonmyun throws his hands up in the air in exasperation, an action Chanyeol thought he would never see the ever composed fightmaster do. It was so strange that he lost his breath for a second.

“This is hard for Kim too, you know?” he scolds. “Sehun is his best friend, and only now that he is grounded and does Kim get a second chance. One that he has been waiting on for years. And it’s with you, that decides to use him as a punching bag for regret? I won’t have it. Not under my supervision.”

“Don’t make this something it’s not,” Chanyeol scoffs. “He’s not up to par! I’m allowed to be frustrated.”

“He’s not up to par because you’re not working with him,” Joonmyun hisses, almost completely losing his composure. Reflexively, he steps back, straightens out his clothing, and takes a deep breath, returning his face to his typical expression. “Park, you have done wonderful things for the base, and we are all grateful for you. But you have not fought in years. You are no goddess either, and unless you are willing to work with Kim, and me, and Marshall Kwon, then I can say you have so tremendously wasted everyone’s time that it is borderline criminal.”

Hardened, Chanyeol stares back at Joonmyun, unwilling to back down but understanding a kernel of truth in his words. How is he supposed to want to drift with Jongin, though, when he has been asked to do so with the very machine he lost his love in? What kind of sick joke is this?

Noticing Chanyeol’s silence, Joonmyun softens ever so slightly. “I know it will be difficult; I never said it will be easy. But you cannot drift unless you let Kim in and work with him. How about you take the day off and go meditate, perhaps talk to one of the base therapists, while I do some core competency training with Kim. I expect you back tomorrow with either a renewed attitude, or a letter of resignation. And either way, I am still your superior, and you will defer to me.”

“Yes, sir,” Chanyeol nods at length, and Joonmyun enters back into the kwoon room without a word.

* * *

He doesn’t want to talk to Sehun about it.

That’s Chanyeol’s first thought as he lies on his bed: there’s no way he can talk to Sehun about it. Jongin is his best friend and original partner, so of course, despite their history, Sehun will be biased. Sehun hadn’t known Baekhyun well, but he arrived on the base during the end of his and Chanyeol’s time together, so he had a taste for the boy before he passed on. It’s not enough to understand though, and Chanyeol knows his best friend won’t be sympathetic, especially since he’s been in a very similar position.

Then there’s Kyungsoo, who’s rational and sees right through Chanyeol’s charades. He can’t talk to him either, just as he couldn’t talk to him before. Jongdae is too soft, Yixing too spacy, Minseok – well, Minseok is an option, but he knows what Minseok will say. Sayaka isn’t due back to Nagasaki until tomorrow, and how can he look her in the eye and ask for her opinion on his own shortcomings in spite of all she’s been through these past months?

Krystal, he guesses, is his best bet. Not that she’s known for being a softie or sympathetic, but once she had been in a similar position, and maybe she will understand. Sometimes he feels a strange familiarity with her, in that she, too, saw her destiny in the base and a found a way to make it her life even when she should have left. Together, they’re ghosts; albeit she a more successful one.

He wanders up to the LOCCENT center, passing by familiar faces in the hall – he’s beginning to notice that some people are looking at him with the same awe and confusion that they did all those years ago. After passing through the initial doors and climbing up the stairs, he sees his younger, more accomplished friend alone in the command center, staring over the Shatterdome with a distant expression.

“Commander Jung?” he asks, and she startles, turning around abruptly. Her hair whirls around her when she spins, alighting her with a type of halo, and he sees her like some grand conductor overlooking her orchestra. Her silhouette, alone at the top of their world, on par with the eyes of jaegers, of gods.

“Ah, Chanyeol,” she responds, relieved, clutching her heart. “Don’t scare me like that, calling me Jung.”

“Sorry,” he says, shrugging. “I was expecting others to be here.” She gestures for him to come join her near the front of the center, and he begins to cross the room.

“I gave them the day off; we had a huge rewire this morning,” she says, as she moves to sit in her chair. Chanyeol takes the one beside her, where Jongdae would sit usually. When she notices his silence, she laughs. “I’m not used to you being quiet.”

“Really?”

Krystal nods. “It reminds me of when we lost Baekhyun. You always talked, sometimes too much, especially when we were younger. It got worse when you were with Baekhyun, and even worse when you were with Sehun. So when I heard your silence…it was the first time I was worried.”

“Lately, I’ve been trying to be more honest with my words,” he responds. “And sometimes that means talking a little less.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he laughs.

“Hard to believe.” She chuckles. “No more calculator?”

“Trying to.”

“We joke, but I think you’ve always been genuine enough. As genuine as this place can be,” she sighs. “What gives?”

“I guess…a lot of things. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

Again, Krystal nods, before looking out at the Shatterdome; she crosses her legs, runs a mindless hand through her hair. She’s beautiful, in a way that Chanyeol has never fully appreciated – all poise and posture, held together and even, but classically gorgeous in a way that appears to transcend time. Much like Sayaka, he looks at her in this moment and feels nothing but awe as she stares out over the Shatterdome, her kingdom, and still finds hope. Her eyes are trained forward, and, in his silence, she begins to speak; her words have always been clean and clear, chosen with care, more elegant than others. In these moments, when they echo, he appreciates her elegance more than ever. “You know, when I first became the Chief LOCCENT Officer, I was going to ask them to take out these chairs. I didn’t want a desk. I thought it slowed me down; I’m always standing during drops anyway, who needs to sit? I came here for action, and this is how I was going to get it.”

Chanyeol is silent, staring right at her, but she doesn’t look back, her eyes fixated ahead. “And then, you know, I watched Sehun get injured. I suddenly understood how it felt. I remember the day my sister got injured in the simulator, when she started seizing. There was so little at risk then, compared to now, but my world had shattered. And then I had to watch Sehun go limp in the connpod, and Zitao panic, and I thought the world was swimming beneath me, even moreso than on that terrible day. Everything was moving so quickly, and I couldn’t tell any of the officers what to do, I couldn’t radio the other jaegers; I felt like every word and voice was jumbling together. I was angry, and I didn’t know at who; perhaps at my sister, or at myself, or at the universe. Why did I let Sehun drop that day? Why not anyone else? And then, in the middle of the chaos, Jongdae pushed out my chair with his foot and looked me in the eyes. So I sat. For the first time in a year, I sat. And in a second I remembered that there is no time for second thoughts, that there is only this very moment that I must get through and everything else will be handled when the time comes, and suddenly the world felt clear again.”

She takes a deep breath. “It’s weird, how much of our lives are here. Why haven’t we just given up? I don’t know. But I can’t leave this place, not now. There’s so many people depending on me, and I owe them.”

Chanyeol lets his gaze linger on her for a little longer, before turning out to look at the Shatterdome too. “I don’t think I can get back in Renegade Tempest,” he says, finally. “And I don’t know why, but knowing that I have to share the drift with Jongin is making me hate him, for no reason. Knowing that he will be in Baekhyun’s spot, or my spot, wherever, it just…I can’t look at him, I feel only anger.”

Krystal rests a hand on Chanyeol’s leg, and looks him in the eye. “If you’re looking for understanding, then I’m sorry, but I’m not going to just blindly give it to you,” she says, but her words are warm. “Because I know you. And surprisingly, I know Jongin. I know you wouldn’t have agreed to this unless in your heart you really wanted it. I know you want this, Chanyeol.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“This is all you’ve ever wanted,” she says. “Perhaps you just need time to sit. I know the world is swirling around you, and there’s a lot going on. The voices all sound muffled, and there’s no time, you might think. But sit, Chanyeol. Take a deep breath, remember why you’re here.” She smiles, softly. “I promise to you, you will be able to sort it out. Talk to Marshall Kwon. Perhaps she can give you guidance – for everything she is, she knows what you’ve been through better than anyone else. And remember that the drift, for all its strength, isn’t more than the space inside your head.”

In a move of gratitude, Chanyeol moves his head to lean on Krystals shoulder. She runs her hand through his long, unkempt hair, and he feels the world slow down, ever so slightly.

“You made the right choice,” she breathes, and the words are like honey on his ears, sweet and reassuring, sure and current, not lost in a someday he feels the importance of but cannot reach.

* * *

Like a ghost, Chanyeol moves down the hall to Marshall Kwon’s office during dinner. He’s sure all of his comrades and companions will be down in the cafeteria enjoying the Friday supper – typically one of the best and most filling meals of the week. The empty walkways provide comfort to him, as he knows that there’s no risk of being seen at this hour, so he can hide his embarrassment, his shame, a bit longer.

Why is he ashamed? He knows the feeling, knows it all too well, but in every choice he has made in the past few weeks, he has tried to find redemption. And for what? Perhaps because, he thinks, he is trying to be a hero without behaving like one; ready to wear the helmet and step into the connpod, but not ready to open up his heart to public and private alike.

Perhaps because he thinks he doesn’t deserve this second chance. It’s coming on the heels of failure; long, enduring failure. Does it change how much he’s been through? Baekhyun is still dead, and it’s still his fault. Could it be Jongin’s blood on his hands next? He thinks of Sehun, probably sitting in the cafeteria with their friends, Vivi perched on his lap, with his ever frailer frame failing to support the small pup, his laugh still strong and hearty but coming from a hollowed face. Sehun had come after him, and as his senior he should have protected the boy better, but he didn’t. Maybe he’s doing more harm than good, getting back inside the jaeger.

He turns the corner and sees Marshall Kwon’s door cracked open, which prompts him to place a tentative palm against it, ready to push and enter the room. Yet, in this split second, he hears the hum of voices, quiet but not necessarily hushed, and the part of him that’s sneaky, the part of him that wants to know what everyone thinks, the part of him that compels him to be loved and adored, pushes his body forward and his hand back to his side, compels him to linger instead of announce himself, and he feels guilty but cannot contain the motion, listening closely to the words being spoken.

“He’s not normally like this,” comes a voice that is most definitely Marshall Kwon’s – feminine and airy, yet firm and certain, with words that are carefully selected even though they appear casual. She’s using her commander tone, so she’s clearly talking to a subordinate, not  afriend. “Park has always been the image of determination. Very happy, always smiling. There’s a certain amount of moodiness but given everything he’s been through; I’m surprised he’s not angrier.”

Chanyeol presses his body close against the door to listen, surprised at the conversation.

“I just don’t get it, is it me?” comes another voice, though this one is not as distinct. “I’m doing all I can, and he doesn’t seem to want any of it. I don’t know how I can be any better if he doesn’t tell me; he was once my idol, my hero, he was everyone’s – I’d do anything he’d say.” Quickly, he realizes it is Jongin – the lazy tone and intonation, interspersed with sudden bursts of excitement, characterize the younger boy’s speech. “Anything, anything at all,” he adds for emphasis.

There’s a series of taps in the silence that follows Jongin’s declaration that Chanyeol recognizes as Marshall Kwon removing her glasses, a habit she had acquired years ago to stall conversations. “He’s going through something. He never gave himself time to grieve, and I think now…he doesn’t know what to do when he must move on. Just give him time.”

“You said it yourself, we don’t have time.” A creaking noise pierces the room – probably Jongin leaning back in the poorly made guest’s chair, Chanyeol thinks. Boa used to tell him how she chose a chair that was a little uncomfortable so that visitors would never get too cozy in her office. _Except you, of course_ , she’d laugh; but maybe she was lying, he still doesn’t know. “Maybe it’s me.”

“It’s not you,” Marshall Kwon responds immediately, her voice firm. “The fact that anyone broke through to Chanyeol at all is astounding. He’s great in the drift but he’s put up a lot of walls, he’s cantankerous when he fights, and he’s hard to get along with beyond a very surface level. For you two to show any compatibility after such a small amount of time?” She makes a grunting noise; Chanyeol imagines her rolling her eyes the way she used to do when they were younger. “You could be a better match for him than Baekhyun.”

“Then why isn’t it working?” Jongin exclaims, his voice raising several octaves. “I’m doing everything I can.”

There’s a silence that precedes Marshall Kwon’s response. “He loved Baekhyun. Still does. They’d been together for years, shared everything. I don’t think he’s ready to give that up and try to share himself, and the pieces of him that he had given to Byun, with anyone else,” she says at length. “So just give him time. He’s been in stasis for years, but eventually he will have to move on. Or leave here. I’m sure Oh can help you get through to him.”

“I don’t know…” Jongin trails off. “What about the Renegade issue?”

“He’s been working on that jaeger for the past three years, leaving it in the bays, tuning, refurbishing. It’s a waste to never let her drop again, and yet, it would be unseemly to put another team in her. The jaegers drift too, and to have someone unassociated with Renegade…well, it’s both dangerous, but also, it would reflect poorly on PPDF if in the news there’s a show about some new team inside of an old jaeger. It would make us look poor and decaying, which we are, but lord knows we can’t tell people.” Another pause, another click; the sounds of conversation, where Jongin wishes to defer but has thoughts anyway. “Our job here is saving the world, but in the process, we play a part – we play the heroes, because it’s not linear, and there will be casualties. Chanyeol is a hero, everything about him, even his shortcomings. As are you. To find two people with this trait, it’s unique. And it can’t be wasted.”

He hears Jongin sigh. “I just don’t know, I don’t know this man I’m drifting with, I don’t know what I can do to help him, and believe me, I would do anything, but I have no control over this situation.”

“Look, I don’t know Park that well, even after a decade, but I do know that he does as he pleases. He always will. Though he has a good moral compass, he cares more about being liked and passing fancies than anything else. He’s moody, repressed, hard to deal with, yet always over the top, he will and he won’t, he’s a hero and…” and he hears Marshall Kwon trail off, her tone frustrated, before she sighs “…surprisingly enough, he’s the type of person that goes after his dreams and expects others to follow, just like he did with Baekhyun-” A clock rings, indicating that it is nine in the evening, time for a shift change or for sleep, and Chanyeol scampers quickly down the hallway to avoid being seen by anyone, wondering what else Marshall Kwon was going to say.

* * *

“Sehun?” Chanyeol calls, rapping his knuckles on the door to his younger friend’s dorm. A few days prior, Sehun was finally permanently discharged from the hospital bays, allowed to return to his old bunk, on the condition that he continued to attend regular physical therapy sessions and check-ups. Even now, Chanyeol struggles to understand what had happened to Sehun on that terrible day in Electra Mira, off the coast of Hong Kong: it isn’t radiation poisoning – he piloted a late Mark III, which lacked the dangerous nuclear core. Nor is it a physical injury, either, or at least not a visible one; yet all the same, his friend is wasting away, skinnier by the day.

The heavy door opens slowly, revealing Sehun behind it. “Chanyeol!” he exclaims, his face alight for a minute before it settles into a concerned aspect. Vivi yips behind him, weaving herself in between her owner’s legs, before jumping at Chanyeol, pawing at him excitedly.

Noticing that Sehun had not opened the door the way he usually would, inviting entrance silently, Chanyeol’s face colors. He pushes the door open with his on broad hand, and Sehun, too weak to stop him, fumbles backwards – as if thrown off guard by Chanyeol’s strength – and ultimately lets him in.

“Ok, what’s going on?” Chanyeol immediately asks once he settles on Sehun’s bed, Vivi jumping into his lap. He hadn’t taken his allergy medicine, so he tries to avoid kissing the pet on the face, but it’s hard to resist – she’s so cute.

Sehun’s face twists in a strange way, as if he’s searching for the words to say; Chanyeol is surprised by the change in character – Sehun never seemed to think much about what he let out, at least not between them, his practices in control barely extended beyond his body. Narrowing his eyes, he turns his head to the side, away from Chanyeol, and the older boy notices the strangeness of the room. It was a dorm Sehun had typically shared with Zitao, for the three years, though now Zitao – who, without announcement, assumed a position as a trainer, beneath Joonmyun, just a few days prior – lives in the executive suites, a line of bunks and dorms designed for those living on the base long-term.

Not that their lives there weren’t long-term, but not in the way a fightmaster’s, or Marshall Kwon’s is. Chanyeol’s parents had lived in the executive suites, so of course he and Yura had too, in their youth; they are prettier rooms, often with views of the ocean, or perhaps televisions and monitors, but still made of the same concrete, just slightly airier, lighter. Maybe because these people are most privy to living their whole lives on the base, they need to be reminded of the world they are saving.

Maybe, rangers are not expected to live long enough to need anything more.

Still, Sehun’s room has not managed to escape Zitao’s finer influence, and Chanyeol knows his former partner had left behind certain items to assure that Sehun wouldn’t let his room fall into complete chaos. The walls are draped in tapestries of rich, beautiful colors, perhaps made of silk; around them are rings of twinkling lights, arranged in such a way that they give the impression of sunlight in the dank room. In the corner there’s a dehumidifier aside a humidifier, perched on a cute stool, definitely there for the sake of Zitao’s skin, and above Zitao’s old desk there are countless pictures, selfies and newspaper clippings, of both Zitao and Sehun. Meanwhile, Sehun’s wall too contains pictures – pictures of him and Jongin, pictures of Chanyeol, of Zitao, of Kyungsoo, of his parents, of his dog. There’s a clipping that talks about Renegade Tempest, a picture of Chanyeol and Baekhyun smiling beneath it, which had always piqued Chanyeol’s interest but never motivated him to say anything; he remembers that day – Sehun called him, breathless, from an ocean away, and through the receiver he said, _Chanyeol, you’re a hero_. On the desk are two bouquets, one certainly from a fan, and one from his mother. Next to it is a bowl of what Chanyeol must assume is potpourri, with a handwritten note from Zitao beside it: _Now that I’m gone don’t let this room fall into squalor. At least this will help with your smell. Love, Zitao._

 _Love._ Sometimes Chanyeol wants to ask Sehun about the nature of his relationship with Zitao, but never does. It’s the one unspoken facet of their friendship; Chanyeol reckons it isn’t his right to know. Jaeger pilots are siblings, parents, friends, yet the kind of connection the drift brings – one of complete transparency, an intimacy people spend lifetimes building – often leads friendship to romance. Often, not always. He and Baekhyun had been lovers; Yixing and Minseok, are, as are Sayaka and Sae, Boa and Changmin, her former partner, had been too. Zitao and Wufan hadn’t, though. As well as some others.

He, many times, had wanted to ask: “Do you love Zitao?” Or maybe: “Have you and Zitao fucked?” Or rather: “Ok, what’s the deal with you and Zitao?” But he had swallowed the urge then and will now. It’s why he and Sehun will never drift, he assumes: there’s just too many things left unsaid.

Sehun still hasn’t responded to Chanyeol’s question, his eyes still narrowed, scanning the room, as if he hadn’t heard at all. “I’m tired,” he says at length, finally. “You’re bothering me.”

“Your existence bothers me,” Chanyeol quips back, before leaning back to stretch out on Sehun’s bed. “I overheard Marshall Kwon and Jongin talking about me.”

“Juicy,” Sehun deadpans back, before moving to take a seat in his desk chair. Despite his slight, and growing slighter, frame, his posture is still rod-straight; he moves like a ghost though, his footsteps light, his body not accustomed to the smaller space it takes up.

“She said Jongin is a better match for me than Baekhyun,” he begins, with a chuckle. “Then she said some other things, that I only care about passing fancies, that I’m selfish...has she ever said those things to you?”

“Did you just come here to talk to me about yourself?” Sehun snaps back, his eyes narrowing again. “Because you and I both know all those things are true, so I don’t know why you’re bothering me. Why did you even ask me what was going on if you weren’t going to let me answer?”

“No,” Chanyeol sputters, looking away from his friend. “I missed you,” he all but whispers.

Sehun seems to soften for a second, but then hardens right back up. “Jongin says you’re impossible.”

Suddenly, Chanyeol twists to face Sehun directly, trying to feign surprise. “Me?” he asks, incredulous-sounding; however, Sehun isn’t believing it for a second, and he rolls his eyes so hard that Chanyeol fears they might sink back into his head.

“Me?” he repeats, mocking Chanyeol’s tone. “Me?” he repeats again, putting his hands behind his ears to impersonate his friend, laughing in an intentionally obnoxious way. “Duh!” he snaps. “Jongin says you’re an ass.”

“I am not,” Chanyeol replies, pouting. “It’s not my fault that Jongin can’t take criticism.”

“Jongin takes criticism better than anyone I know,” Sehun states. “You could literally just take a giant shit on him and he would use it to be better, the best in the world. It’s you that’s the problem.”

“I thought you were my friend,” he snaps back.

“I’m Jongin’s friend too!” Sehun yells back. “And you know that, that’s why you’re here to ask me questions. What are you even doing, Chanyeol?”

“It’s only been a few days! We are just adjusting to each other,” Chanyeol nearly shouts.

“Not just with Jongin, with all of this, with everyone! You have to make up your mind! I begged you to, I said you’re my world, I said make a choice, and hear you are, _refusing_ to make a choice!” Vivi, shocked by her owner’s sudden outbreak – something uncharacteristic, perhaps due to Sehun’s easygoing yet silly nature – hops off the bed and scampers over to whimper in the corner.

Chanyeol stares at his friend, or rather, the failing image of him. There Sehun is, just a boy, yet he’s already wasting away, thin, gaunt, tired, having a mid-life crisis at 22. “I can’t have someone else get hurt,” he responds at length, looking away. “I’ve let everyone get hurt, and Jongin doesn’t know that. Jongin doesn’t know who I am, that I’m not as good as he thinks.”

“There are always casualties,” Sehun says immediately, without hesitation. “Jongin is an adult, he can make up his mind. Have you ever believed that the world does not revolve around you and whether or not, at any moment, everyone likes you? Have you ever thought, I don’t know, that other people are affected by your choices, by your stalling, your moping, your refusal to change?”

 

 

 

> _“What do I do, Baekhyun?” Chanyeol says. He’s a crumpled mess on his bed, but for some reason he can’t cry. “I have to keep fighting. But in my heart, I know it’s not worth it anymore.”_
> 
> _“That’s not true,” Baekhyun snaps back. The rain is falling, so strong and powerful that they can hear it even in their dorm, nestled deep inside the base. “How can you say that?”_
> 
> _“It’s true! It’s the apocalypse Baekhyun, and we can’t stop it. You’re right, we’re just becoming martyrs…” Chanyeol whispers, his arms wrapped around his knees. “I look at these monsters and I only see chaos, chaos I can’t control, endless, and it’s taking everything I love, and for some reason I can’t give it back, I can’t get revenge, I can’t kill them, I can’t stop them, all they do is take, and I’m trying, but there’s no point…”_
> 
> _“There are always causalities,” Baekhyun says. “No matter what. You can’t save without casualties. To know that someone died for the right reason, isn’t that enough?”_
> 
> _“For what?” Chanyeol yells back, his voice strained, angry, tired, grieving. “What is the reason? What is this mindless violence? I know I stood up earlier today and said I could handle it, but maybe I can’t. It’s boring me, this place, the endless, the endless fucking madness, all for what? For what reason? Why did I want to save the world so bad? Why did they want to save the world so bad that they died for it?” His voice cracks and he dissolves into sobs that wrack his entire body, heavy, and he knows that Baekhyun is shocked, shocked to see the heavy tears he has been hiding for months, buried inside of him, but they have welled up and overtaken him with a force he cannot, for once, suppress._
> 
> _Swiftly, Baekhyun sits down beside his sobbing lover and places a reassuring hand on his back, and Chanyeol feels embarrassed that he can’t hold it together. “Maybe, someday, when the sun shines again, we will leave this place,” Baekhyun begins, rubbing Chanyeol’s back in circles. His voice is like a song, pure and sweet. “And the sun will shine. And we will leave. And we will know the world is a better place for it,” Baekhyun promises.“Because you know what, Chanyeol? Fuck this world. I’m over it. And I’m over what it’s done to us. I want to hate it, but despite all of it, I can’t. I want to. I really fucking want to, especially today. I hate these cloudy days when it rains all summer. I hate this place. I hate it. But I can’t. I can’t truly hate it, not as long as it has you.”_
> 
> _Chanyeol holds his head between his legs, and Baekhyun picks up his chin in his delicate fingers, and he looks at him with his deep brown eyes, that seem endless and full of life, more colorful than the grey ocean he had been staring at that morning, more bright than the coastline, dark and murky, and he feels nothing but love and fear for the man he adores._
> 
> _“I can’t hate it, because this world gave me you,” Baekhyun coos, and Chanyeol sees tears forming in his eyes. “And there’s no one else I’d rather become a martyr with. Fuck revenge. These monsters don’t deserve it. But salvation? The earth, this earth that gave me you, gave us each other, this earth deserves salvation. So as long as I have you, we have to save this world. As a thank you, for loving me, for creating you, for bringing me to you, that’s all that will ever matter to me. Good or bad, I don’t want to ever live a lifetime without you, so let’s save this world so we can be reborn and find each other again. Because without you, I don’t care. I love you too much, and it’s not fair, but who cares. I’d fight a thousand kaijus to save you, and that’s what we have to do, we have to save each other. Whoever dies, fuck revenge, let’s save who lives, let’s be reborn, let’s be together then, let’s save these incarnations, because this world gave us each other, and in the end, that’s more than enough for me.”_

“That’s all I think about,” Chanyeol hisses back, and he feels a tightening in his chest, twisting deeper and deeper.

Sehun shoots him a look back, his eyes narrowed in that way they get when you actually manage to rile him up. “Not everything is some catastrophic consequence. What about day to day?” He pauses, looks away. “What about me?” he whispers, almost, before picking up his tone again. “What about all of this, everything I do, Kyungsoo does, Jongdae, Krystal, Marshall Kwon, Jongin, is doing, all of this, for you, for our brilliant, special, broken Chanyeol, who we adore?”

“Don’t mock me,” Chanyeol hisses.

“You think I’m kidding?” Sehun asks. “I love you! We all do! I would do anything to protect you, because you can’t protect yourself!”

 

 

 

> _…I’ll do whatever it takes to save you, because you’d never save yourself…_

“Then what can I do?” Chanyeol begs. “Tell me, tell me what I can do, tell me how I fix this, all of this.”

“Open up, you dumbo!” Sehun exclaims, exasperated. “Give him a fucking chance!”

“I can’t!” Chanyeol shouts back, equally as exhausted, and he leaps to his feet. He’s towering over Sehun and it’s almost menacing how much bigger he seems than his friend, who, sitting down, appears to be nothing more than just a boy. Not that Chanyeol looks anything like a man – he exists somewhere in between, as if frozen forever at age 18 to always bear impish features, yet his height, the length of his limbs, the muscles beginning to ripple under his shirt, imply otherwise. “He doesn’t know about the difference between who I pretend to be and the terrible person I am, and I don’t know how to fix that.”

Finally, Sehun looks up at Chanyeol, and they hold eye contact for a time. “I know who you were, who you are, and I still love you,” Sehun says at length. “He will too. But you have to let him in.”

Sehun’s eyes are surprisingly soft, deep pools watering under Chanyeol’s heavy gaze, eyes you can drown in, for years, stormy, uncertain, soft, endless. There’s something honest and true in them that Chanyeol can’t bear; maybe it’s a disfavor, a part of him unhappy with the parts of him he keeps from the boy. Or something else entirely. Whatever it is, Sehun’s gaze makes his chest tighten further, and he recalls countless things: memories, perhaps, of what carried them to this moment. Of who they were, of a past, of a time when Chanyeol’s bravery and desire to be the best, to save the world, was unwavering. Sehun has only known him in this shell of a man he became in the wake, and yet, somehow, stays with him anyway. What good is there to do, then? What goodness is left when you’re lying? What do you do to tell someone that you are not as great as they think?

“I need to go,” Chanyeol whispers, finally breaking their stare. Sweat drops are beading on his forehead as he turns to leave, and he hears Sehun twist, as if to go after him, but he doesn’t. His legs stride down the hall quickly, but it isn’t enough, so he breaks into a run, sprinting down the cement halls, past young J-Tech engineers and members of K-science, all returning to their dorms, all getting ready for bed, all invested in the spectacle of the pilot that was, that could be, that will, the walking newsreel, and he needs peace and silence, he needs a way out. Mouths move as he nearly bumps into people, there’s no noise though, just echoing silence, white noise gone awry.

 _In all truth_ , he thinks, as he runs down the hall, he needs Baekhyun, someone that knows him, yet he can’t give himself – all of himself – to someone the way he had his partner, and the emptiness left behind, the silence that drowns him. _I’m drowning_ , he thinks, but he knows he’s not, and he sprints faster and harder until he reaches his room.

* * *

 

 

 

> _No goodbye, white noise gone awry…good night, good night…no goodbye…there are always casualties, my fate is you…saving what we have….my fate is you…red, blue, grey…Shore Lucky, the endless rain…_

Chanyeol thrashes in bed as his brain throws senseless images at him: sunny days dissolving into pointless rain, a thrashing sea, a relentless tempest, trees falling endlessly, a moonless night sky, all promises that should be kept, but cannot.

* * *

“You’re here,” Joonmyun says, his face alighting with the slightest smile, barely differentiable from his usual genial aspect except, of course, to Chanyeol, who had awoken with need for validation that could not be quenched by anyone but Joonmyun, Marshall Kwon, or Sehun. The minor quirk of the lips is enough to give Chanyeol energy for the day.

This morning, Chanyeol resolved to keep practicing, if only because there is nothing else to do; maybe for the validation that comes from people like Joonmyun, whose disappointment is quelled when he wills himself to move forward. The scorn of the fightmaster and of his best friend had deeply unsettled him, setting off a response within himself that he could not control – the response being an insatiable need for approval, for love and praise, that when delivered will not satisfy him, he knows, but at least will quiet the relentless discontent he experiences day and night.

Maybe, at least, when he is practicing all day, he becomes tired. And when he is tired, he sleeps, deeper and more intensely, the nightmares less real. So you take what you can get, he thinks; he’ll take exhaustion over meditation, for now.

On the mat, Jongin is preparing for the day – wrapping his hands in tape while sitting in some cross-legged position that Chanyeol only dreams of having the flexibility to possess. The younger boy shoots him a look – of judgement, of amazement, of worry – before returning to his stretches.

“Hey,” Chanyeol says as he approaches his partner. “I’m sorry for yesterday.” Jongin stops mid-wrap, and though he doesn’t look back at Chanyeol, his face still visibly softens.

“Ok,” Jongin responds, and then finishes wrapping his hand. Chanyeol realizes that’s all he’s being offered, so he turns away and begins preparing himself for the day.

The beginning of training is always the same – a jogging warm-up, dynamic stretches, a few rounds of yoga – something Joonmyun preached the importance of – and then strengthening workout focused on their weak points. For Jongin, he does back and ankle exercises; for Chanyeol, he does elbow and knee ones, because his bow-leggedness has made him especially prone to blowing out his knees. The first hour of sparring that follows is usually free-form, and Joonmyun will simply watch, taking mental notes, which he will deliver to them throughout for the second hour of sparring. Then they break for lunch, before returning and repeating the process – another warm-up jog, albeit a shorter one, plus stretches and yoga. Next is their strength workouts that target either legs, arms, or core, followed by a fitness test, and then either two to three hours of sparring, before cool down and dinner.

It’s exhausting work – in total, they workout for over eight hours, sometimes longer if they manage to upset the fightmaster, or shorter if they really upset him, as Chanyeol did yesterday. They spend the warm-up in almost total silence, aside from a few grunts, and Chanyeol uses the time to try and center himself in the moment _. This is my partner_ , he thinks; _this is my friend._ He watches Jongin go through his back exercises with Joonmyun, pointing to different vertebrae, saying: it hurts here, this one’s weak, this one burns.

Once the real practice is underway and sparring begins, he finds they both are dancing around each other, neither willing to go all out. Still, he also realizes that Jongin is starting to figure out Chanyeol’s own weak points – his knees, for one, or, how Chanyeol often ends up a step behind in close combat. He typically tries to focus on longer range attacks, going in with force for a minute before recoiling, but Jongin more and more is trying to lock him into fast-paced battles at an arm’s length. For all his praise as a jaeger pilot, Chanyeol isn’t particularly coordinated – he’s a strategist, not an emotionalist - and Jongin is beginning to exploit that. Joonmyun comes in, with his slight smile, says the usual: Chanyeol, balance yourself; Jongin, don’t overextend yourself; protect here, leave off here, strengthen the core, pull from the stomach, hit with the back, not the arms, Chanyeol; Jongin, tighten yourself, the further you try to reach the more you risk hurting yourself.

After four hours of calm practice, lunch comes without any drama. It’s bothersome – somehow, this strange peace feels more strained than the open war, and the morning practice had dragged on without any relent. Chanyeol found himself listening to Joonmyun with only one ear, every word of advice slipping through him, useless; his body seemed only half present, as if working on mostly autopilot. Worst of all, it appears that Jongin was experiencing the same feeling: he, who always worked too hard, put in too much effort, easily went over-the-top, seemed restrained, as if half-heartedly going through the motions of pretending to fight Chanyeol.

For what it’s worth, Joonmyun didn’t appear bothered by any of it; yet, the fightmaster rarely appears bothered by anything except outright rebellion. As he walks out of the room for lunch, his face remains in the same slight smile he always wore. Peace, perhaps, is better than loathing.

“What is it now?” Jongin fires at Chanyeol, his voice icy, the minute their teacher leaves. The older pilot turns on his heel, shocked by the sudden outburst. Perhaps not.  

“Nothing,” Chanyeol quickly defends himself, throwing his hands to his side to indicate that he has no intentions of fighting. “I’m just trying to practice.”

“You’re not even putting in fifty-percent effort,” Jongin says. “I liked it better when you hated me yesterday, because at least you were trying. There was a little bit of space where I could try and get into your head, but now it seems like you’ve shut the door completely.”

Chanyeol rolls his eyes. “I never hated you. Thanks for telling Sehun that, too, even though it’s not true.”

“Sehun’s my best friend, I tell him everything,” Jongin says, clearly miffed. Chanyeol scoffs and turns on his heel, beginning to march out of the room, when something strikes him hard on the back. He spins around to find Jongin’s sparring stick on the ground, the younger man staring him down. “You can’t just walk away on me like that! You can’t just shut people out and expect us to keep trying!” Jongin shouts after him, seething in rage.

And once again, something within Chanyeol is triggered.

It is these moments where Chanyeol feels unstable, much like the renegade tempest he used to pilot, like the storms he dreams of, like the apocalypse he fears. He works hard, every day, to appear the same: to be the man he dreams of being, happy, well-adjusted, good. And maybe he was that person, once; yet years ago, on a sunny day in the south Pacific, something inside of him short-circuited, and the vulnerabilities it created – like a hardwiring gone wrong, but not quite broken yet – resulted weaknesses that, under the stress of silence, collapsed. The resulting gap is what defines him, and inside that gap he finds the person he fears most – the true Chanyeol.

In this moment, the true Chanyeol breaks.

“I can do whatever it is I think is necessary to save this world,” he snaps back, swooping up the sparring stick in one hand, striding towards Jongin, who does not back down, but rather, assumes his fighting stance.

“You aren’t saving the world acting this way!” Jongin yells.

Rather than respond, Chanyeol lunges forward and drives a hard jab into Jongin’s waist. The boy doubles over, completely taken off guard by the cruel attack; he falls to his side. Taking advantage of the momentum of the younger boy’s movement, Chanyeol hits him on the other side, causing him to almost topple forward. He backs away, still in fighting stance, as Jongin saves his fall with one arm.

Quickly, Jongin snaps his neck up to stare at Chanyeol underneath his sweaty, shaggy bangs.

“What the hell, man?” Jongin shouts across the mat.

“What?” he spits back. “If you can’t keep up, then maybe you aren’t cut out for this.”

“We are going to be partners Chanyeol,” Jongin yells back. “I’m letting you into my head! Give me something to work with.”

“What do you even need to know?” Chanyeol shouts back, angrily squatting down to Jongin’s level. “My entire life has been broadcasted on TV!” He’s gesticulating widely, his arms flailing about, impressing himself as some creature that is larger than life. “Everything you could know about me is out there!” He slams his stick to the floor and it echoes throughout the room. “That’s me! That’s all there is! That’s Park Chanyeol!”

“That’s not true!” Jongin nearly screams back. “There is more to you than that, and I know it!”

“There isn’t!” Chanyeol spits. Their faces are inches away from each other, eyes firmly locked but Chanyeol finally breaks it by snapping his head away. “That’s it. That’s all there’s ever been. I’m sorry to disappoint you.” He stands up to leave, disappointed in himself, in Jongin, in the world, in the hand he’s been dealt.

“Why are you doing this?” Jongin asks. “I want to be there for you, but I can’t if you don’t tell me what you need.”

“There’s blood on my hands, Jongin,” Chanyeol says. “And you will never understand how that feels, which is for the best, but I’m different than you. The goodness inside of you is something I’ll never have again.”

“Good, bad, I don’t care. I want to understand,” Jongin says. “I want to be in your head, for better or worse. And you can’t blame me for that.”

“Blame you?”

“You can’t blame me for wanting to try,” he asserts, his eyes never leaving Chanyeol’s face.

He sighs, heavy, his heart feeling strange, his stomach burning with a pit of humiliation. “I’m not blaming you. I wish I could blame you, I wish I could hate you, but I don’t,” Chanyeol says. He rolls off his heels, dropping down and into sitting position, his head drooping between his legs. “Everything you think I hate about you, everything I think I hate about you, isn’t true. There’s nothing to hate. You haven’t done anything, and I’ve done everything, all of it wrong.”

“How?” Jongin asks, incredulous. “You’re a _hero_. You were literally born to be a hero. Despite how uncoordinated you are, and gangly, and slow, you literally forced yourself to become a hero, like, against everything, despite a genetic predisposition to being a terrible fighter,” Chanyeol winces at the description, but he’s feeling too unsettled to let offhanded comments into his tortured psyche, “and you’ve actually saved thousands of people when no one else was. You’ve been saving people for years, even when no one’s been saving you,” he says earnestly. “That’s a real hero.”

His stomach leaps, churns, boils; he thinks of the words _that Park Chanyeol,_ he hears the shock when people find out who he used to be, who he truly is. The pit inside him grows deeper, the embarrassment uncontrollable. “That’s not true. That wasn’t me; that was someone else.”

“It was you,” Jongin says firmly. “Stop playing a broken bird, that’s not you at all. I know. I’ve heard, and I’ve seen, and I know you, and I wouldn’t call you modest. Neither does Sehun.”

“It’s an act,” Chanyeol responds quickly. “Who you have to be to be a hero, that’s an act. All of that. Baekhyun was the hero, not me; everything I am was because of him, you don’t understand. I haven’t saved anyone, in fact, I’ve let everyone I love get hurt.”

“That’s not you, that’s just the time. We live in a violent, brutal time. No one’s safe. At least you were out there.”

“I had to be out there. I was born on this base, my parents were pilots, it wasn’t a choice. I was bred to be a jaeger pilot and yet, for some reason, I needed the love of my life to push me to be worth anything. Like you said, my body doesn’t want to fight; without Baekhyun, I’m no good.”

“At least you were out there,” Jongin insists. “I’ve been dancing all these years, doing nothing. People are still dying, Chanyeol. Here and elsewhere. It’s just the way the world is. I wish I could’ve done what you did, because I want to save people. My body gave out too, so I guess I know.”

Chanyeol sighs. He sees the opening: the chance to let Jongin in, to come to understand the boy he will be sharing his brain with. Through the small hole his heart allows he begins to see his partner in a different light: he’s bratty but earnest, sincere, hardworking, and perhaps a little tortured. Maybe he’s not all that different. Lazily, Chanyeol lifts his head a bit to look Jongin in the eye, and asks: “So why Lima?”

Jongin chuckles, and it’s almost mirthless how the empty rattle of a laugh echoes through the kwoon room. “You go where they need you,” he says. “I wanted to be with Sehun here, but they needed us in Lima, so we shipped out two weeks after graduation. And Sehun was shipped back two weeks after that.”

With careful speech Jongin launches into the story of his life: of the fatal injury that grounded him, of the rehabilitation he endured as he watched his best friend become a hero, of the long and winding road to recovery. With delicate fingers he points out his weakest spots, the nodes in the base of his spine, a harsh callous of flesh on his side, the weak joint of his ankle, and he invites Chanyeol to touch them, to feel the softness of his body, and with his broad palm Chanyeol kneads the flesh, Jongin grimaces, Chanyeol recoils immediately, sputtering out “I’m sorry,” but Jongin only laughs, says he asked him to touch, says it’s not his fault. It’s strange: Jongin inflicts on Chanyeol both stubbornness and openness, but most of all he feels the desire in the boy to save someone, to do something, to sacrifice himself, endlessly, to a goal that exists out there somewhere, albeit where, he is not sure.

Their bodies inch closer together, limbs splay out and entangle as Jongin delves further into his past. He recounts the dance academy he studied at, his love of ballet, all the different companies he traveled between. Then his ankle injury, and how video games filled the void that jaegers and dance had left as he worked, relentlessly, to regain his grace. He talks of his travels from Seoul to Busan to Daegu to Jeju; from Tokyo to Okinawa; from Beijing to here, to Hong Kong; and then all the way back.

Then, with a slow and steady tone, he recounts the last attack Shizuoka, how he had been there with his company touring for a production of _Giselle_ , an amazing piece: how his feet graced the floor, the abstract movement of the arms, the legs, the tune of the composition, the conductor moving his arms, the rhythmic movement of each member of the orchestra, the heat of the spotlight, the lightness of his partner, the twirl of her tulle skirts, the veils the dancers wore, everything, pure and white, like snow, untouched and beautiful, a kind of grace that this world does not deserve.

And then, just as Giselle is named the Harvest Queen at the end of Act I – he describes this moment with intention, how it is a set of tense indignation, both a triumph and the ultimate undoing of the gentle peasant girl Giselle - a tear ripped through the concert hall, harsh and grotesque; an arm extended in and ripped his partner right from the stage, and he watched off to the side in horror, frozen as the monster plucked her from the crowd. _The worst was her screams_ : wrought with pain and fear and also curiosity, as if she could not believe what was happening as much as anyone else.

Chanyeol is aghast; except during the attack on Seoul, he had never been a civilian facing a kaiju – he has always been on the base, watching, waiting, facing each monster as a collective effort with little surprise and detached risk management. He had warnings, usually, the clock signifying the breach ripping open, the sirens letting them know when to get into gear. To be caught in the middle of a kaiju attack, completely unarmed – he can’t fathom it anymore. He feels the ghost of Baekhyun’s body in his arms as they huddled together, he remembers the disbelief – Seoul was supposed to be safe, but Leviathatus had swam through the Han River until he emerged, giant, near Incheon, and no one was ready for the chaos that ensued – and how he had clung to his friend, the tiny boy, with ferocity. Still in his arms, the ghost of Baekhyun trembles, whimpers; he thinks of how he thought that the PPDF would protect them endlessly, how his parents would save them and he and Baekhyun would take to the skies together, like two shining gods. And now he sits here, and images of Sehun limping through the base cross his mind, of his frail body, of Vivi in his lap, of how now to make Sehun safe he had to take him away from the machine designed to protect them, a hero gone to rest. For what, for what was all of this? What right does he have to mope, even more, when Jongin had his partner ripped out from a stage in front of him?

 _What kind of a fool becomes a pilot,_ Chanyeol wonders. He thinks of shores pulling in and out, the hulking body of the kaiju, scaly and slimy, green and blue, emerging from the water with waves tumbling beside it, it’s hideous arm smashing through the concrete of the opera house with ease, the way it’s malformed fingers wrapped around a ballerina in white, her skirt, stained with blood and slime, red and grey and black. His stomach lurches, he hears rain drops falling, the shores pulling with more force, he feels Baekhyun’s ghost in his arms, heavier than before, he sees Sehun’s ghost now, too, and Jongin’s as well, lying at his feet  --

“You know who saved us?” Jongin asks, pulling Chanyeol out of his monologue. The smooth texture of Jongin’s voice manages to calm his racing heart, and alights the calculating part of his brain.

Chanyeol mulls it over in his head: the attack on Shizuoka was caused by Aerusion, a Category IV kaiju and a beast of a tier that was then difficult to manage. It could fly, which no kaiju could do before, hence the reason why Shizuoka was not properly evacuated prior to the attack – it had originally targeted Sendai before flying down the eastern coast of the country at jet speed. It required a four-pronged jaeger deployment approach using two teams from the local Tokyo base, one from Nagasaki, and one from Hong Kong. He laughs; of course life would be this ironic. “Electra Mira.”

Jongin nods. “It was surreal; I felt like I was watching my own life in that moment. We needed to run to safety but I was paralyzed, because in that suit, in that jaeger, was my best friend, with someone else. It should have been me, and then I realized that I didn’t want to stand by anymore. Giselle – or, rather, my partner, Sojin – was gone, and if it had been me in there with Sehun, would she still be alive? I don’t know. But from that day I dedicated myself to coming back here and finishing where I left off, whatever it takes.”

They sit in silence for a minute, and, at long last, Joonmyun returns, his lips quirked ever so slightly as always. For the rest of the afternoon they assume a true ceasefire, a gentle peace. Chanyeol can’t fully open himself up yet; and Jongin can sense how he is still guarded, but during their sparring they begin to move together, ebbing and flowing, and for a solid ten minutes, to the casual onlooker they appear to be two halves of the same beast.

* * *

Their days dissolve into a rocky peace. Chanyeol looks out the window sometimes and struggles to tell time, but he can feel the warmth of Jongin beside him as every second melts into another, and its promising. At Marshall Kwon’s insistence, he begins to see a therapist, a kind, gentle woman who has been on the base since his parents have. Once a week, she walks him through his past, through the five stages of grief, and as August washes in September, and September dissolves into October, he can feel his heart slowly pry open. 

Today is a tepid fall day, and Marshall Kwon announces their first drift test; Chanyeol feels his heart that had so slowly been mending leap into his throat. Naturally, the day would come: they have near perfect scores on the simulator, and two months of daily, grueling practice is less than standard but still more than needed for some academy graduates – let alone ones like themselves, who had originally been prescribed half that amount

Marshall Kwon’s small mouth forms the words in front of their team in the kwoon room: it will be in Renegade Tempest, newly renovated with the help of Chanyeol’s J-Tech team, in a week. Every word seems like it is being spoken through water, barely reaching Chanyeol. He feels Jongin’s gaze heavy on him, and the younger boy even reaches out to hold his hand, but it’s surreal, perhaps, a moment from another life that Chanyeol half-lives.

Everything feels murky and unsure, as if in a rainstorm, but it’s autumn, and the showers stopped two months ago, it’s sunny in the only way it can be at the PPDF. Krystal is nodding, shaking her mane of smooth, black hair, Jongdae to her side; Joonmyun’s smile is still present as he stands beside Boa; Kyungsoo is wearing his strange expression that he does when he tries to focus. Sehun’s nowhere to be found, Chanyeol notes, but for everyone else the world appears normal, same as always. There’s a strange contingency: six years ago – or is it seven now? – he had stood in the same place with Baekhyun, Marshall Kwon in front of them, a different crowd, of course, but everything eerily placed in the same spots, as if this moment is stolen from the past, simply recast with a few different faces, aging lines etched on them, so as to make it real, but otherwise the same. It was different then, though; it was a moment of celebration, not desperation, a second coming, a story of vengeance, the team that would save the world.

Today, they stand as a last ditch effort.

And so the ceremony passes with little fanfare, and everyone applauds for the new Renegade Tempest team, and Chanyeol shakes hands in a daze, but he can feel Jongin’s heavy gaze the entire time, unwavering, certain.

“Where’s Sehun?” Chanyeol whispers in his future partner’s ear as they begin to lope out of the room once the crowd dissolved.

“He’s home,” Jongin responds immediately, his brow furrowed. “I thought he told you.”

“He didn’t,” Chanyeol says back, confused as his friend’s behavior. Jongin looks at him peculiarly, and Chanyeol searches through his memory: is it true that Sehun left without saying a word to him, his best friend? “Or maybe he did, maybe I forgot,” he sputters out, but he’s almost certain it’s a lie.

Jongin shrugs. “It could have slipped your mind. We’ve been busy. And it’s only going to get busier.”

“I know,” Chanyeol says.

“Why aren’t you happier?” Jongin asks as they turn down a corridor.

Quickly, Chanyeol notices the lack of attention he has been placing on maintaining his expressions, and twists his mouth upwards, his eyes into a smile. “I am happy,” he insists, looking at his partner.

“Sure,” Jongin responds, and he shrugs, and they walk the rest of the way in silence.

* * *

“You’re overdoing it,” Chanyeol scolds, three days later, in the kwoon room. Joonmyun stepped out moments ago, demonstrating a faith in the boys that few teams earned, and they continued to practice relentlessly in his absence, their bodies drenched in sweat, dancing around each other, back, forward, hit, stop, reset, up, down, back forward, hit, stop, reset. Chanyeol is panting hard, his hair pushed out of his face with a headband, but Jongin is panting even harder.

“You’re underdoing it,” Jongin snaps back, staring at Chanyeol from underneath his shaggy bangs. They are still in position, Jongin’s sparring stick frozen in place next to Chanyeol’s ribs, the young boy halted in a lunge, the older one stuck in a turn.

“Break,” Chanyeol calls, and they finally untangle themselves. Jongin paces to the edge of the ring for water, and Chanyeol stares at him. “I’m not underdoing it,” Chanyeol says. “You’re going to hurt yourself, going on like this.”

“We’re going to be fighting kaijus, not each other,” Jongin responds flatly.

“You’ve been injured,” Chanyeol points out, gesturing to his partner’s ankles. “Keep overextending yourself in those lunges and you’ll turn that joint.”

“You’re bowlegged,” Jongin says back.

“What does that have to do with this?” Chanyeol asks.

“It’s essentially an injury,” Jongin responds plainly, before squirting more water in his mouth. “Bad knees, thin legs, poor support. You have the same weaknesses as yesterday and as four years ago.”

Exhausted, Chanyeol rips the headband out of his hair, “I suddenly feel more sympathy for you.”

“Why is that?”

“I understand how frustrating it must have been when we first started training together.”

The young boy lets out a barking laugh, finally letting a smile cross his sullen face; in response, Chanyeol laughs back.

“Look, I,” Chanyeol begins, taking advantage of the change of environment, “I just want you to be careful. I’ve done this before, and we’re going to do this right. Which means practice, but not to the point of breaking. You put in your work, day to day, every hour, but who knows when a kaiju will show up? You can’t be exhausted or tired when that happens, and adrenaline only gets so far.” Jongin is staring at him in the way that he often does, all pouty lips and big eyes, and the weight of the gaze is almost unbearable, but Chanyeol knows that he will soon be facing millions of people, all staring at him the same way. “The most important thing right now is honesty, and _honestly_ , I’m worried about you.”

“Why?” Jongin questions immediately.

“We’re going to be drifting soon,” Chanyeol says, “with Renegade. And Renegade knows me, but you don’t, and if you aren’t ready, you could get hurt. There’s a lot in there that you might not see. You can’t be tired or else you might chase the RABIT.”

“Then you need to talk to me, not scold me,” Jongin says back, turning away from his partner. Chanyeol sighs.

“I’m trying, but I can’t do this all at once! I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time.”

They both sigh almost in unison, then quirk smiles at each other that immediately fade. The silence is uncomfortable, but Jongin isn’t offering anything, and Chanyeol doesn’t know what else to give. He feels his mouth begin to open, to form words just to fill the air, to move the guilt away from himself – even though he knows, deep down, he’s to blame – but Jongin beats him to it. “I’m going to go get a change of clothes from my room, be right back,” Jongin notes to Chanyeol, who nods in response as the younger boy lopes out of the room.

Every step Jongin takes is casual, his hunched back faking aloofness, but with time Chanyeol has noticed just how calculated this act is; his eyes follow the boy out of the room, lazy yet refined. Today’s practice so far has been grueling, but with the drift test coming up, Joonmyun has been ever-absent, attending to the recent academy graduates and designating their positions, holding new auditions, assisting with simulator tests, leaving Chanyeol and Jongin to their own devices. It’s a sign of faith, Chanyeol assumes; one he wonders if they’ve truly earned. Every day, Jongin pushes the limits of their practice, especially once their fightmaster leaves, and Chanyeol finds himself more tired, more exhausted, and more out of shape. How can he hold up against a boy younger and more talented than himself? Baekhyun, of course, had been infinitely more talented than he, but their natural chemistry made up for Chanyeol’s flaws.

There it is again: Baekhyun. In four days, the floodgates will open and the rain will pour and Jongin will be in his head, a space shared only with Baekhyun. How do you reconcile that? How does he protect himself – and his lover – without pulling away? He falls to the mat, laying down in exhaustion. The physicality of training is always grueling, but the mental aspect is so much more so.

“Akimoto?” Chanyeol calls out when he sees a short, strong figure enter the room that pulls him out of his internal monologue.

“Chanyeol, as always, just Sayaka is fine,” she says with a smile, and then she hands him a bottle of water that she has carried in.

“Wow, thank you,” he responds, graciously accepting the water. “I guess it’s weird, because you’re older than me, to call you just Sayaka.” He sprays some of the water in his mouth and moans. “Ugh, I forgot how draining training is.”

“I know,” she replies. “Even worse when you are out of condition.”

“You’re telling me. Have you ever been out of shape?”

She shrugs, and chuckles in response. “Not really. I used to be the Nagasaki base fightmaster, which kept me on my toes. Always been doing something.”

“Jeez, you kill me,” he laughs, and then squirts some more water on his face. “I could tell though. You have the muscles of someone that’s always been working.”

Chanyeol collapses back down on the mat and looks up at Sayaka, who, in this moment, towering over him, looks even more regal than usual. She’s quite a woman, he notes; she’s the kind of person that’s destined to be a pilot. There’s something about her that is so striking, so fierce, so strong, and he thinks of how, even in the face of the loss of her partner, all she wanted to do was fight – that, he thinks. That’s a pilot.

 _And what does it make me?_ He wonders. Half of one, perhaps. Or something else. Even now, more than ever, he finds himself wondering where the Park Chanyeol that was ended and that one that is began. Once upon a time, he had been so sure, so determined, that nothing, even the biggest loss, could deter him. And now, he can’t tell if he wants to go back, even when he has it all just at his fingertips.

_I was gifted with the voice of an angel, and I was cursed to be born during the apocalypse…_

“So, how do you like him?” Sayaka asks at length, noticing Chanyeol’s pointed silence.

“Jongin? He’s great,” Chanyeol responds, like a reflex, but then upon Sayaka’s introspective look he softens, realizing that she, of anyone, deserves the truth. “Ok, so I’m trying to do this thing where I’m more honest with people, because I have to let someone back in my head. So…maybe, what do you think of us?”

“I think you two are perfect for each other,” she says immediately, nodding her head.

Chanyeol boggles, shooting back up to sitting. “Perfect? Impossible. Baekhyun and I were perfect for each other. I don’t think…”

“Oh, Chanyeol,” Sayaka sighs wistfully, extending an arm downwards to ruffle his sweaty hair. “This is why.”

“What is why?”

She rolls her head from side to side, as if choosing her words. “You both try too hard.”

“Try too hard?” Chanyeol laughs. “That’s definitely impossible.”

“You are always trying, Chanyeollie,” she answers. “Calculating, choosing, doing…you do what you do to be liked. And it is a bit obvious, but it is so well intentioned, who can be mad? While Jongin, Jongin tries because he wants to be the best he can, and you try because you want to prove you were the best once. Somehow, I think, it balances out.”

“Wow, Sayaka,” Chanyeol laughs. “You read me like a book.”

Sayaka chuckles in response. “I am older than you, and I was a fightmaster. Eventually, you see it all. And you start to understand better those you see. It is give and take. I know all the pairs that they put on TV. I knew you too, once.”

Hesitantly, Chanyeol takes another sip of water, and wrings his hands together, feeling for new callouses, old scars. Suddenly, Sayaka’s gaze feels all the more heavy, more knowing. How hadn’t he realized that even she knew? There’s a price for fame, and it’s never being able to run.

“Do you think I was always like this?” he whispers at length.

“No,” she says assuredly. “I know you were not. I saw, Chanyeol. Jongin reminds me a bit of yourself, perhaps more inherently talented, perhaps a bit less sure.”

He lays there, confused, soft and relenting.

“You know, Chanyeol, fate is not real,” Sayaka says at length. “We talk about it, destiny, fate, but none of that matters. We work with what we are given, and sometimes it is taken, and then we move on. There is no right choice in the timeline of human history, just the right one in that moment.” She sighs. “Who are we, as lowly humans, to decide what is right or wrong? I think we are given what we have and we make our best with it. The only thing that is certain is that we must do what we can to be good to others; that is our only true destiny, the only thing left when you remove the hurt we suffer. You are trying, always trying. More than others. More than you need to, more than this world deserves.” She looks away. “The world has given you pain, and you have turned it in to goodness, to power, to strength. Do not take chaos as your fault. You have learned to survive it; do not succumb now.”

 

 

 

> _“What is destiny?” Baekhyun asks. “It’s nothing. What is destiny but a reason to move forward, motivation to keep us oriented to a certain goal. There is no such thing.”_
> 
> _“Then why are we here?” Chanyeol asks from beside his lover. They are sitting on the roof of the Hong Kong base, where helicopters drop off Marshall Kwon, or maybe Kyungsoo and the K-Science team, or pieces of dissected kaijus, all in a hurry and rush. Today, it’s quiet though: the sun has sunk underneath the earth revealing an endless black sky, no stars, it is Hong Kong. No hustle and bustle, just a quiet that comes only in the absence of frenzy: they know at any given moment the breach can open, spewing out another monstrosity, and this small reprieve will be over, but for now it is peace, or the closest they have come to it._
> 
> _“Because this is the right thing to do,” Baekhyun sighs. He’s savoring it, the silence, a moment alone with his lover where they get to be separate bodies. “Because you know you can’t live on without saving the world, and I can’t…”_
> 
> _“Can’t live on without doing it too?” Chanyeol offers,_
> 
> _“I can’t live on without saving you,” Baekhyun corrects him. “I don’t care so much about others, I mean, I do, but I’m not like you, Chanyeol, I don’t need the whole world to love me, I don’t feel this pull in my heart to serve others, indiscriminately, in fact, I’ve only ever served myself.” He sighs. “But I can’t leave you, I don’t want to, maybe you’ve changed that. Maybe I’m doing this all for you, fuck, I know I am, and I’m good at it, I’m better than you. Some say it’s destiny, you pulled me to this path where I have skill, but who says my destiny wasn’t to be a singer? Who says I had to be a martyr with you?”_
> 
> _“You won’t be a martyr,” Chanyeol says, and in this moment, he is sure. Maybe because that’s the only thing he will be certain of: losing Baekhyun was non-negotiable._
> 
> _“No, Chanyeol, that’s not it. I don’t care if I become a martyr, it’s not about this, life or death, it’s about you. Haven’t you seen?” He lets out a sigh; his voice has become increasingly harried, frantic, wrought with the inflection – the raw emotion that he never could suppress – that has made them famous. Every word feels weightier, more honest. “It’s always been about you,” he declares, and he’s staring into Chanyeol’s eyes more intensely than ever before. “You share the drift with me, you know you are my entire world,” he continues, and his voice has dropped down, but it’s not a whisper, it’s firm, it’s assertive, it’s Baekhyun declaring a love they have worked every day to assure is true. “All of it is you, and I hate it, and I hate you for it.”_
> 
> _He laughs, but Baekhyun is serious, giving him a look that lacks the playfulness of their day-to-day life. Maybe Chanyeol knows it, but deep down, he has never understood the intensity, the desperation of his partner’s love before now; even in the drift, you can get lost._
> 
> _“I don’t want anything else but to be with you,” Baekhyun says forcefully. “So what is destiny? My destiny was to sing. Destiny doesn’t exist. We just make the choices that are best for us in this moment, hope it doesn’t hurt anyone. I know following you forever will result in only pain for myself, maybe some others, but also great goodness. Who cares if it’s destiny, fate, whatever? My fate is you,” he asserts, certain. “My fate is this violent world that brought me to you, my fate is saving it, saving whatever it’s given me. Saving what I can leave you, when it’s time, saving what I have when you go, I go, who knows.”_
> 
> _“You aren’t going to die,” Chanyeol insists, reaching over to hold his partner. Baekhyun chuckles mirthlessly. “I mean it, I won’t allow it. I can’t. I will never let you leave me.”_
> 
> _“Don’t you get it? This is the first time it actually is all about you, and you can’t understand,” he says, and then settles into an uncharacteristic silence that stretches out across the coast, one that Chanyeol cannot breech._

“What is hurt, though?” he asks. “How do you redeem the pain you’ve caused others? What’s goodness when you’ve done so much harm?” Chanyeol feels tears well up in the back of his eyes, a foreign feeling; he fights them back but they remain, hot, unfamiliar, repressed, as if bubbling up from some deep well, carrying with them to pain of the past eleven years, ready to spill out and cover Chanyeol, birth him anew. Fighting, he swallows them down. “I ask myself this every day, every second of every day, for years, and I can’t find an answer, maybe all I know is I’ve done wrong, and perhaps that’s enough. I can get everyone to like me, but those I needed most are gone, and I wasn’t good enough to save them. Maybe I deserve this.”

She pauses; her hesitation is long, inducing anxiety within Chanyeol – he fears she agrees, that he is bad, that he cannot be saved, as penance for his failure to save others.

When her voice finally comes it is quiet, but stable and clear. “Sometimes, I do not even think kaijus are wholly bad.” She pauses. “Chaos is without reason, without meaning, but also without reference. It exists, and always will, and we cannot control it, because it will never understand good nor evil, nor anything at all.” Her voice is certain, stable. “Chaos takes without asking, and it cannot be controlled; we can only do our best to combat it. To fall to chaos is the fault of no one. It simply exists. And what can I say to stop it? What I can, and nothing more. Good or bad, right or wrong; there is no such thing in terms of definites. There is just intent, the only thing that differentiates us from the chaos. As long as you function to protect, to better, to help, you are working to save us all.” She looks to Chanyeol’s eyes. “Chaos exists, but do not let it inside of you. When chaos harms, it does not matter what you do. But the workings of such a beast do not make a person bad or good. You yourself decide that”

Sighing, he slowly scrambles back up to standing, all awkwardly long limbs. He doesn’t know what to say, but he wants to say something, to hold this woman, to love her, to save her. Once again, he is towering over Sayaka, and yet he feels so small in her eyes. “I wish you could stay, Sayaka,” he says. “I mean it.”

Extending an arm upwards this time, she ruffles his sweaty hair again. “I wish I could too. I go back tomorrow. With Sae.” Chanyeol sees the warmth of her smile and he knows it will be fine. “What a pleasure it is to have her.”

“Back to saving the world?” he asks.

“Back to saving our world,” she confirms.

For some reason, Chanyeol feels all the safer knowing that he’s in Sayaka’s hands, for the time being. She leans over, kisses his cheek, squeezes his arm, and turns to leave; he watches her figure recede in the distance, out the propped open door, into the cement hallway, away. The next time he sees her, he doesn’t know what she will be. Maybe, just as everyone else has, she will disappear, be taken from this world so forcefully, trying to defend it with her goodness. He thinks of her as the sun, at twilight, and he imagines her holding his hand, and he imagines her saving him; it reminds him of an image from his childhood. He wants to save her, more than anything, he wants the part of her he sees to live forever, after him, so that her goodness can light up the world. She is golden, she is twilight; and in that he knows that she will not be salvaged.

In his heart, he knows that she’s made her choice, that her destiny is to save. Without realizing it, he begins to cry, the hot tears spilling out of his eyes uncontrollably, detached from his body. He can’t tell if it is pure sadness or nostalgia or happiness or safety that motivates him, but it feels good, better than anything else. He lets them go.

* * *

 

 

 

> _Let’s be reborn, fuck revenge…it’s always been about you, always been about you…only thing…you…_
> 
> _It’s raining, here. Chanyeol can’t discern where. Where are they, actually? Everything is…grey, he thinks; the rain is pounding, relentless, endless. Incessant._
> 
> _“Your knees,” Jongin calls, from a distance. “Your knees” He looks, but he can’t see Jongin. Away, though, Sehun is in the distance; he looks small, and weak, and shorter than Chanyeol remembers. “Chanyeol,” Sehun calls, his voice soft and pained and torturous, wrought with tears. “Save me."_
> 
> _“No, Chanyeol,” Jongin calls, but he still can’t tell from where. “Your knees. I told you. You can’t save him Your knees, Chanyeol…”He can’t place where Jongin is, or anything; he looks down and sees water rush over him, and looks up and sees Sehun._
> 
> _“You promised,” Sehun says. “You promised,” Jongin says. “You promised,” says another voice, and another, and Chanyeol looks around and he suddenly sees everyone he knows – Baekhyun, Krystal, Kyungsoo, Yoora, Jongdae, Yixing, Minseok, Joonmyun, Sayaka, Sunyoung, everyone he’s ever met, his mother, his father._
> 
> _“You promised you would protect us,” they all say. Baekhyun, Sehun, his mom and his dad are all staring at him. “And now there’s nothing,” Jongin’s voice calls, but he’s disappeared. “But silence…”_
> 
> _“The sun, it can’t shine here,” Baekhyun tells him. He reaches out to Baekhyun, and he sees Sehun start crying, but then in a minute it all washes away, the water pouring in from every place, rain falling too fast, he cries out but no one hears him…_

“Chanyeol?”

Jongin swings open his dorm door, revealing himself; he’s sleepy-eyed and shirtless, his hair mussed up, with a pair of dirty, worn-in sweatpants slung around his waist. He rubs his eyes, as if he can’t believe the sight in front of him: Chanyeol, his eyes bloodshot, drenched in sweat, at 2AM.

“You can’t just show up here and not say anything,” Jongin adds when Chanyeol doesn’t respond. He colors, uncomfortable with what he’s done to his training partner.

“I,” he says, and then he looks down, runs a hand through his hair. “I had a nightmare,” he finally says at length. Jongin shuffles in the doorway, leaning more of his weight against the door, staring at Chanyeol with his half-lidded eyes.

The silence weighs heavy, and Chanyeol searches for the correct way to phrase his response. “You see, I, have these dreams. Sometimes.” He pauses. “Most times.” He pauses again, looks at Jongin, and, in the absence of response, feels the urge to tell the truth. “Almost all the time, maybe. It’s a part of the job, I guess…” he trails off, before pointing at Jongin’s bed. “Since I’ve already woken you up, can I come in?” Jongin nods immediately, though slowly, as if moving through cold honey, stepping aside to let Chanyeol in. His room is neat and orderly, which Chanyeol was not quite expecting: Jongin often forgets to wash and rewears the same clothes, so he was half imagining a pig stye to great him.

Rather, Jongin’s room – a guest suite – is near bare. There’s a calendar on the wall with pictures of ballerinas on it, a Nintendo handheld console on his desk, a few stacks of old comics and books. The only disorderly thing is an Ace bandage hanging haphazardly on his closet door, but inside the closet every article of clothing – few there are – is hung up, neat and correctly, with a small hamper beneath. It seems uncharacteristic.

“I always thought you’d be messier,” Chanyeol mutters as he walks to the bed, taking a seat without being invited. Jongin appears to stiffen, before softening and joining his partner.

“I’m not like Sehun,” he says plainly, but his eyelids are slowly raising, the sleepiness being shaken.

Chanyeol chuckles. “Sehun is a mess, he just won’t admit it. I always tell him to-”

“Why did you come here just to talk about Sehun?” Jongin asks, interrupting Chanyeol.

Gulping, Chanyeol looks away from the younger boy, his eyes darting around the room. He chuckles nervously again, tries to find words in himself, which is strange – he never has to search like this, usually there was an ability for him to fill any silence, naturally; he was born to be a star, he remembers his mother say, and that’s why he was so good at it. On TV, in the bays, in the streets: wherever, he knew what to say, or at least what was expected of him.

But now he doesn’t.

“Don’t wake me up just to talk to me about Sehun,” Jongin says firmly. He shuffles to his feet, but Chanyeol lets out an arm, latching on to his wrist, stopping him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Jongin looks down at him, his deep eyes – smooth, pooling, glassy eyes, they shine, Chanyeol thinks – boring into his own. “I’m not good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“Talking,” Chanyeol says.

“You literally never shut up,” Jongin scoffs.

“I’m not good about talking about what’s in here,” Chanyeol gestures to his chest. “I’m good at saying what people want to hear, or what’s expected. But myself, when it comes to this,” he sighs, “I just don’t know. There’s a part of me that I don’t know how to access.”

“And the dreams bring it up?”

“I guess?” Chanyeol shrugs, but when he looks back at Jongin, he admits it. “Yes, they do.”

“What are the dreams about?” Jongin asks, settling himself back beside Chanyeol.

“The past, the present. The future. No, sorry,” Chanyeol says, but he realizes halfway through how vague that is. “They’re rehashes, I guess. Moments from the past, words said, but sometimes they get pasted onto other people, it’s like a collage. I hear my mom’s voice in Marshall Kwon’s mouth, or Sehun singing the way Baekhyun did, or you yelling words our old fightmaster used to. Sometimes it’s familiar places, sometimes not. Always the same colors, always ends the same way, but different modes of getting there.”

Jongin nods. “Do they bother you?” he asks.

“They used to bother me, but now it’s different.” Jongin snickers, leaning his head on Chanyeol’s shoulder, and strangely enough, he starts laughing back.  “What’s so funny?”

“You wouldn’t be here if they didn’t bother you,” Jongin says, though he’s still giggling, and he’s smiling, not angry, his dark eyebrows arching upwards. His face seems so beautiful, so honest, it takes Chanyeol’s breath away for a second. “Or at least, you’d be with Sehun, or something. Not me”

“Sehun’s not talking to me,” Chanyeol responds quickly. “But, yeah, I’m not here to talk about that,” he adds, looking away, sensing a tenseness that ripples through Jongin’s body even from a distance. For a minute, he tries to articulate what he’s feeling, but he finds himself stewing on the words. “It used to be, if the TV host asked me, you know, ‘How do you live with the horrors you’ve seen?’ I would respond: you find it in you to focus on the miracles, the saviors, and the little victories. You never forget all that you’ve lost but you remember all that can be saved still, and that’s where hope is found.”

“You’re talking in circles, Chanyeol, and it’s 2AM.”

“Ok, ok,” Chanyeol says. “That’s what I would say. And it’s half lies, half truth. But the real truth is, it used to be, I had these nightmares, they bothered me for weeks, I couldn’t get through all these horrors. Then I wouldn’t sleep, I started taking medicine to sleep, if I didn’t take it one night, it’s like the dreams were on acid – the same collages but all these crazy colors, crazy things. Now it’s not like that. They still bother me, they wake me up, but in the morning, I can find a way to go on, it’s not this great hole inside of me, the same way it used to be.” He takes a deep inhale. “But you’re going to see them, inevitably, and you need to know that in the drift, there’s truth, and there’s lies. And they might be weird. The ones on acid might be weird. The ones about you, saying things you’ve never said, doing things you’ve never done, those will be especially weird. You have to let them drift by.”

Jongin sighs, reclining on his bed. Chanyeol watches him, watches his lithe body lean back, all sinewy muscle rippling across his chest. He feels an impulse to run his hand up his partner’s stomach, to trace the outlines of his abs, to be close to him, but it passes, not instantly, but like a wave, it rises and then crests and falls, splashing against the coast of his heart, a coast – a coast unsure, unclear.

“You came here to tell me that?” Jongin asks again.

“Yes,” Chanyeol says firmly, his eyes darting around the room, making careful effort not to look for too long at Jongin’s toned torso, the way his sweatpants seemed to be hanging lower and lower on his hips, his mussed-up hair flopping over his eyes, the angle of his neck as he stared at him, veins pulsing from underneath his smooth skin.

Quickly, Jongin darts upward, back into a seated position, scrunching his knees to his chest so he is just inches away from Chanyeol’s face. In his chest, Chanyeol can feel his heart skip several beats as Jongin’s hot breath grazes his cheeks, his collarbones, the crook of his neck, and the same strange feeling he hasn’t felt in his years rises in his chest. The warmth of Jongin’s body beside him feels inexorable, and he wants to close the distance between them desparately but just as he begins to move, inching inexplicably closer to his partner, the feeling gets replaced by disgust, as if he can’t imagine what he’s about to do, and he starts to pull away; and yet again the feeling subsides, and once more, just as he pulls away, he wants to move closer

“I really like you, Jongin,” Chanyeol finally breathes out, scrambling to his feet in a graceless motion. Jongin is pushed back by Chanyeol’s sudden action, and he looks confused. “I’m just unsure. I haven’t, you know…”

Jongin scoffs almost, but then he smiles. “It’s my bad,” he says. “I know, it must be hard. It happened so recently…”

“That’s it,” Chanyeol begins saying as he paces back and forth the length of the suit, “you get it. It’s like, three years is a long time, but is it really?”

“What?” Jongin asks, incredulous.

“What?” Chanyeol asks back, confused.

“I thought this was about Sehun,” Jongin says.

“What?” Chanyeol practically screeches. “What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?” Jongin leaps to his feet, reaching out to grab Chanyeol’s arm, spinning him around. They are staring at each other, almost eye to eye, and Jongin seems ever so taller in the moment, even though he stands below Chanyeol.

“Baekhyun!” Chanyeol shouts, exasperated.

Jongin drops Chanyeol’s arm with a force, and he turns back to his bed, muttering under his breath. “I can’t believe this. All this time…” He looks back at Chanyeol, running his fingers through his hair. “All this time, I thought you were in love with Sehun, but you can’t love anyone, can you?”

If his heart was tight inside his chest before, now it appears to have leapt into his throat; Chanyeol feels as if he is choking, the world below him disappearing, much like it did that day, his knees buckling with pain. _Sehun?_ He asks himself. Sehun is but a boy; one of his closest friends; a pilot, a confidant, a colleague, but a lover?

“No wonder he ran away,” Jongin continues on, but he’s laughing now, almost incredulous. “He confesses to you, and he gets nothing back. He thought you were in love with me, and I thought so too, but you can’t love anyone, can you?”

“Sehun doesn’t love me,” Chanyeol insists.

“He doesn’t love you?” Jongin asks, laughing. “He _adores_ you. He talks about you all the time, for years, he’s enamored with you, so completely it’s annoying. I’ve never wanted someone to be happy, even him, even Taemin, the way he wants you to be happy.”

“I love everyone,” Chanyeol adds absentmindedly.

“You like everyone,” Jongin says to him pointedly, “but you don’t love us.”

“That’s not true.”

“You just want to be liked, but you don’t-” Jongin starts.

“Stop it, Jongin,” Chanyeol commands the boy. Strangely enough, his partner immediately quiets. “We have to drift soon, so let’s not bring in hard feelings. I’m sorry I came here.”

Jongin lets out a grunt that is wrought with pain and anger. “Come back,” he says. Chanyeol turns back to look at him as he is passing through the ingress of the room. Smiling slightly, Jongin gestures to his bed. “How about you sleep here tonight, ok?” Chanyeol looks at him, his eyes watering, and nods.

They lay together in the bed, Jongin wrapping his strong arms around Chanyeol’s torso, nuzzling his head into the crook of his neck. “Thanks for trying to let me in,” he whispers, as the two of them begin to drift off into space.

“Thanks for protecting me,” Chanyeol responds, half awake, half asleep, but Jongin is snoring by then. For the first time in a long time, he has a long, dreamless sleep.

* * *

Chanyeol reads a passage this morning about heroes.

About what it means, who they are; perhaps most about how they fall. Where do heroes go, after the end?

He had slept in Jongin’s bed again, as he had for the past few days, in a platonic and chaste manner, to ease the nightmares, to promote closeness. This morning, though, he had awoken too early, couldn’t keep his eyes closed, his stomach turning, so he slid out of his partner’s room and into his own, and reads about what he had once wanted to be.

Around 6, he changed and went down to the cafeteria, feeling uncertain but ready. How something that had once been a part of him, a part of his heart that he had no desire to change, became so unfamiliar – he wonders. But there is no time now to dwell on it.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” Chanyeol asks, sliding in next to his old friend. Sehun is perched on the edge of the cafeteria table, alone, not even with Vivi. He looks slim and hunched, as always, though a bit more vibrant than before he left.

“You’re not my keeper,” Sehun mocks back, refusing to turn towards him. His hand is gripping his fork, which is mainlining grits into his mouth, so tightly his knuckles are white; his eyes, meanwhile, are fixed straight ahead.

“I’m your friend,” Chanyeol insists, beginning to dig his fork into his food.

“You were busy,” Sehun responds.

“Ah, you behave like such a child,” Chanyeol sighs, rolling his eyes back, before turning to facethe younger boy, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t block me out.”

“I’m a child? Don’t block _you_ out?” Sehun exclaims, but he’s laughing. He whips around to stare Chanyeol in the eyes. “Fine; I am,” he admits, throwing up his arms. “But I can do as I please, I’m old enough for that.”

Chanyeol bristles, his calm slowly fading, but he tries to reign in the upset that’s bubbling in his stomach. “You could have told me. You could have phoned me, or something,” he adds, staring Sehun down. “You were gone for a long time.”

“Do you remember what happened the last time we saw each other?”

Confused, Chanyeol searches through his memory. “I don’t know?” he says. Sehun loudly scoffs. “Oh yeah, we argued about Jongin. Fine, you were right,” Chanyeol continues on, but Sehun suddenly stands up.

“I should have known,” he mutters, angrily picking up his platter and striding away.

“Sehun!” Chanyeol calls, and he stands to chase after the boy, but Jongin appears in this instant, grabbing his wrist.

“Don’t,” Jongin says when Chanyeol spins to face him. “You’re not the most tactful with these situations.”

  
“You aren’t either, Mr. EQ,” Chanyeol snaps back.

“I never said I was!” Jongin chuckles, before sitting down. He gestures for Chanyeol to join him. “But today’s the day,” he says, and his voice is edged with uncertainty that is unbecoming. “Let’s just get through this.”

Chanyeol smiles and sits beside his partner. “It’s going to be fine,” he says. “I’m nervous too, but we’ve been practicing for months. You have a perfect score on the simulator. We’re going to drift, and it’s going to be fine.”

“I know,” Jongin says, laughing a little.

“I know too,” Chanyeol responds. They settle into some mindless chatter, but he finds himself looking back at the door, wondering if Sehun will come back. He doesn’t.

* * *

He and Jongin stride down the hall in perfect synch, through the LOCCENT center, and down to be suited for the drift test on this crisp fall morning. Jongin looks all the part of a handsome young pilot, his hair gelled into place, his mouth quirked into a smirk, his smooth skin glistening beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. The time has finally come – in spite of it all – that Chanyeol can feel and predict Jongin’s movements without looking at him, and their harmony is inspiring.

Sunyoung helps them go through the process of clicking in the spinal clamps and placing the pons system on himself; she winks at Chanyeol when the comes over to finalize his metaphorical armor. “Ranger Park,” she says. “Handsome as always.” He laughs in response, unable to feel anything, only excitement.

Shining like angels, in white and black, Chanyeol and Jongin finally make it into Renegade Tempest, striding in perfect unison. As they enter the connpod, Chanyeol looks up to see the entire LOCCENT team staring at them: Krystal at the forefront, her hand on her hip, Jongdae seated beside her, Marshall Kwon standing in the center, Sunyoung walking up from the back, Kyungsoo, Xiumin, Yixing, Joonmyun and Zitao, among others, shuffled off to the side in the friends-and-family-sort-of-space, though Sehun is nowhere to be found. It’s nerve-wracking, but comforting to see all of his guardian angels above him. As he walks over to the lefthand side, Jongin instinctively starts moving towards the opposite.

“Park, on the right,” comes Krystal’s voice, firmly speaking through the system. He shoots her a confused look across the bay, though he wonders if she could see it, and, as if she could hear his hesitation, she adds: “You used to pilot on the right and you should be the dominant partner, given that Kim doesn’t have the same experience you do.”

Chanyeol pauses, his gaze lingering on Krystal; Jongin pauses as well, his eyes boring into Chanyeol’s back.

“Park Chanyeol,” Krystal says firmly, her eyes narrowed and unblinking. Jongdae nudges her, whispering something in her ear, and though Chanyeol knows what the officer is saying, he is done dealing with it. He’s getting in the jaeger. He’s doing this – isn’t it time that he stopped procrastinating? It’s happening. He can’t run away.

Extending an arm to wave it off, Chanyeol smiles. “Understood, Commander Jung.”

Krystal inclines her head, and nods slightly at him, while Jongdae shrugs, but he looks strangely relieved. He moves to the right side, and they begin snapping into place, their helmets fill and drain with relay gel, and the pons interface begins to load.

“You ready?” Chanyeol asks Jongin, as everything has been set up.

“I want this,” Jongin confirms. “Let’s go.”

“Initiate neural handshake,” Krystal calls out over the speaker.

“Initiating neural handshake,” Jongdae echoes.

And, in a second, Chanyeol is pulled in.

The drift is a strange, fuzzy place, where everything is bathed in a grey light, much like the Shatterdome on a cloudy day. Chanyeol feels the warmth of Jongin beside him, and the weight of Renegade buzzing around him. Rain is falling as the memories pass, and he finds glimpses of Jongin’s past, too: the lights of a stage, the mouth of a woman beneath his, the feeling of Sehun’s blows landing. The rain falls and falls, and there are waves passing over: the beach day goes through his mind, as does Chanyeol’s first day at the base. He lets them roll off, and reaches out for Jongin.

 _Jongin,_ he calls out through the drift, searching for him through the rainstorm. _Where are you?_

“Chanyeol, you’re great, but Jongin, you’re way out of line,” Jongdae communicates over the speaker. “Pull yourself in.”

The sound of Jongdae’s voice impresses a weight of anxiety on Chanyeol, and the rain becomes more intense; he searches for Jongin with more desperation. His presence is resting near Chanyeol, but it is not close enough for Chanyeol to help him. _Come here,_ he says. _Come back to me._ Wading through the puddles and the rain, he sees the figure of Jongin in the distance, and in the same distance, he sees himself, younger, softer. Idealistic and energetic.

A hero.

“Park, what are you doing?” comes Krystal’s voice, edged with worry and anger. “Get out, and get Kim back.”

“Right,” Chanyeol says. _Jongin,_ he thinks, and he presses through more of the drift, looking for the boy, but in doing so he is brought closer and closer to his old self. His old dorm, his old life.

He doesn’t want to look at it.

 _Come here,_ he says again. He peers over Jongin’s shoulder, reaching out for his metaphysical hand, and sees inside his old dormitory. His younger self is dressing up, his body buffer than it is now; there’s a figure in the bed, tossing and turning, and there’s an alarm ringing, but it’s distant and faint. When he sees the scene play out, part of him wants to watch; it’s from a simpler time, easier…

 

 

> _“Fuck!” Baekhyun screams from the top bunk._
> 
> _“Ready for kill number eight?” a smirking, younger Chanyeol quips back; he’s already putting on his gear. “This’ll be easy.”_
> 
> _“Let’s get it over with, save the world, whatever,” Baekhyun responds, but his voice is tinged with energy, boundless and honest._
> 
> _“His name is Nemes, a category III…” Chanyeol is explaining as they race down the hall to the Shatterdome._

“Don’t go in there with him, Park,” Krystal’s voice says. Quickly, Chanyeol pulls himself back, trying to reach out to Jongin. _Let’s go,_ he says, but Jongin is still standing at the end of the drift, far away from him.

“Kim, back in line. Park, get him out of there. Don’t chase the rabbit,” Jongdae echoes.

Finding himself on the edge of a memory is strange: Chanyeol hasn’t chased the RABIT, or Random Access Brain Impulse Trigger, in years. Back in the day, he and Baekhyun were trained professionals, and there was no point in reliving memories they had shared, anyway. Since Baekhyun was his other half, there were no secrets, nothing to be said or done, so the past would flit past them in a second, and then they would settle into the warmth of the drift, the two of them and Renegade, with ease. If either of them did get stuck in a memory, it was easy to pull each other out, using the gravity that had eternally brought them together – and kept them coming back to each other – for all those years. The drift between them was still fuzzy, but not raining and foggy like the drift between him and Jongin; it was bathed in that warm, golden light that basks over the Shatterdome at those special moments, not the cold and grey one he finds here.

Yet Jongin is no professional and Chanyeol doesn’t have ten or so years of friendship to use as the basis for connection between the two of them; just as Chanyeol finally manages to reach him, he steps forward and envelopes himself in the memory.

“Fuck, he’s going in,” Chanyeol hears Krystal announce, but he’s slowly getting immersed in the past, and cannot find himself in the rain, which is pounding harder and harder. _Stop it Jongin,_ he says, desperately, but it’s too late; the scene dissolves, and the dormitory turns into…turns into…

The connpod. 

 

> **_000_  **

> _Silence. It's deafening, almost like white noise gone awry but it's just nothingness, stretching for miles. Silence and light, silence and bright, white light, blinding him. Chanyeol digs, looking to find anything – the worst memories, of Baekhyun's brother, of his parents, of the attack on Seoul, of his years in the academy. Of anything._
> 
> _There is nothing._
> 
> **_015_ **
> 
> _When he looks to the water he sees dead bodies floating, backs up like little bugs almost. It's cartoonish, and that makes it all the more sickening. He pushes down an urge to retch, his eyes starting to blur together past and present through tears. Everything is mixing into grey and blue and red, the stretch of water tainted with kaiju blood, the sirens inside - he can't hear them but he can see the flashing lights, telling him to leave...his hands though...they are the reddest of all..._
> 
> _When he blinks the colors wash into one another, leaving just an image of Baekhyun, laughing. Besides that, there is nothing._
> 
> **_034_ **
> 
> _A slam to the side awakens him again. Baekhyun's body hangs limp with a pole through his chest, just as a rush of cold seawater splashes through. Their jaeger is bound to go haywire with another wave; Chanyeol tries to pull himself together, forcing out an arm. He manages to grab a tail as Nemes attempts to dive underneath. With every piece of himself he has left, he hurls the monster as far as he can get it. It's not far enough, but Nemes is injured too so with a plop – the noise is so soft and non-threatening it makes him sick – it sinks a few hundred meters away. That's all he can do._
> 
> _The Kaiju is gone, for now, but it will surface in a minute. What’s left now? He tries to strategize, what he does best, but he can’t beyond this very moment. The silence burns his ears as he wills his arms to move forward. One leg feels a million pounds heavier, and his knees, especially his right one, is throbbing with an intensity he cannot push down, and he can't trip this time, no, with even the slightest hesitation providing the perfect opportunity for Nemes to get them back, so he takes the pain, he wills the leg forward. All he can do is buy time, hope that Baekhyun can wake up before the beast gets its second wind._
> 
> **_077_ **
> 
> _Nothingness. For miles. He looks around and sees only the sea, rough and churning, and the black sky, and the eerie buzz of nothing. Black to grey to red and then nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He swings a leg forward, hears his knee crack, sending shivers of pain up and down but it’s dull, he knows it hurts – it throbs – but it feels like it’s happening to another body, another being. His head is pounding in synch with the rhythm of his movement. Inside, he tries to remember how long someone can be dead before they can't wake up again. It's just a pole – they'll take it out, technology is better now – 20 minutes? No, less than that. He better run. Nemes is stirring not that far in the horizon. Another leg swings forward, and his lungs let out a wheeze._
> 
> **_192_ **
> 
> _Time is passing faster than it should. They're calling to him, but its fuzzy and distant, “Chanyeol? Are you there? Kaiju signature rising, 3 o'clock. Get the fuck out of there!” He turns to his right and sees the water churning; there's no way he can beat this – it's a category III and it’s too fast for him. He's alone, in an open Jaeger, with only half a brain to move it._
> 
> _He looks back to Baekhyun. Wake up. Wake Up. Wake up. Please. I know you will._
> 
> **_254_ **
> 
> _Something hits him, harsh, to the side, and then he's flying, unsure of exactly where the impact is coming from or where he's going. Baekhyun's limbs limply blow in the rushes of wind that burst through the cabin. There's only so much time left. Chanyeol twists his body midair, lands on his feet – falls to a knee, this is so much more painful than it was even 3 minutes ago, more shivers racking his body as every movement intensifies the torture._
> 
> _Baekhyun, wake up. Please. I’m sorry if I’m hurting you, but I can’t do this alone._
> 
> _Chanyeol pivots as quickly as he can and starts running, trying to load his left cannon in the meantime, buying every second that he can. There's blood in his mouth, his nose, seeping down his face into pools on the ground. His head is throbbing and a mist of cold seawater is washing over him from the gash in the left side of the connpod. Red and grey and black. The horizon is red and grey and black, the tempest brewing red and grey and black._
> 
> _I need you, he screams, he thinks he’s screaming. I love you, come back. But there’s no time, no time for pleas, he keeps going forward, melting into the horizon, red and grey and black, the color of his own self, the color of the drift._
> 
> **_280_ **
> 
> _He hears a guttural wail. He tries to push himself forward even faster; the cannon can't power up in time, it's letting out squeaks and is still only halfway ready to blast. Blood is seeping down into his eyes and there is only silence and the screams of the kaiju, and his head will burst soon, and he will give his life to Baekhyun in a matter of minutes. There is a fire in his legs and arms and torso and every part of him is aching and he will not live to see the end of it, but Baekhyun will wake up if he makes it back in time, he knows it -_
> 
> **_294_ **
> 
> _The cannon is finally done loading. He can feel Nemes catching up to him, angrily jetting through the water while it screeches, trying to catch him with its arms that are ribbed with spikes. Chanyeol moves his body on the left leg and it fucking hurts, there's something in his side; he turns to see an arm as it reaches through the hole in the control center, splaying small tentacles that are probing around the inside walls, inching towards Baekhyun's limp body._
> 
> _“Chanyeol! What the fuck is happening!” some static screeches, but a tentacle rips into the control box and kills the wires._
> 
> _“No!” Chanyeol screams and fires the cannon, moving his arm to punch the monster in the gut. He continues to pivot, trying to burn through the kaiju so it's arm can't get any closer to Baekhyun. The monster wails, louder and more angry than before. The tentacles begin to retract but the arm tries to push further into the control center. Chanyeol turns more, pushing the cannon into overdrive, and brings a heavy leg with razors lining the foot into Nemes's stomach. It screeches on impact, tries to move forward, tentacles inching out, but he uses every last bit of energy he has to drive his leg and his throbbing knee into its stomach, ripping the monster in half, and then it melts into the water, spraying blue everywhere. Chanyeol wastes not another second; he pulls his leg out of Nemes’ stomach and sprints in the other direction, to the shore. It hurts, god it fucking hurts, but he looks to Baekhyun and continues to run as fast as he can._
> 
> _601_
> 
> _The shore is so far away; his breath doesn't reach his lungs anymore. This is autopilot, this is everything he has left, his reserves stored in the deep recesses of his body. There's images – Shore Lucky preparing for drop, a name on the TV, banner lines scrolling through every event of his life, Shore Lucky kills another kaiju, Shore Lucky defeats first category II, Shore Lucky's pilots go out to dinner, Shore Lucky...Shore Lucky, he’s piloting now, against this dirty coast, he must survive, he must clean it up, return it to it’s former beauty, the white sands, where are they now? Why has everything faded from golden light to grey, to red, to black, whatever it is, he will fix it, he just has to make it home, and then once he’s back – once Baekhyun is back in his arms, once his lover is safe – they will fix it, together…they will save the world, save each other, all they have…_
> 
> _It's past living, now. Pain has reached a level to which he feels himself blacking out. It's all fading, no more blue, no more grey, only red. Red in his mouth, red in his eyes, red all over his hands and all over Baekhyun. Only a little bit longer. Then, Baekhyun will wake up._
> 
> _895_
> 
> _They collapse immediately on the shore, and with one last surge of power, he rips himself out of his restraints and his head is short of bursting – the pain has never been so much more intense. There's blood everywhere, rushing out of his nose, from his head, from his mouth, he lets out a cough and sees it stain the ground. He wipes it off as he rushes to disengage Baekhyun. There isn't time to do it properly, he hopes Baekhyun can take the pain, it's just once – he feels new, hot blood rush over his hands as he tries to move Baekhyun as carefully as possible – and there's tears, too, rushing down his face, and everything is so loud, out of nowhere, as if there's suddenly life, and everything is pulsing too fast and his head is throbbing so hard and he can't see straight as he hacks up even more blood and they're saying his name, he thinks, and he clutches on to Baekhyun harder, hopes they know to save him first, because he – because Chanyeol, he thinks that's his name, he's losing it now, he knows Baekhyun is there but who is he? - because whoever he may be can wait. Baekhyun, he says. Baekhyun needs to be saved. Baekhyun is the entire world, he thinks he’s screaming, Baekhyun is everything, this isn’t a choice, he needs to live, he’s all there is. Take me, he yells, take me, take me, take me, take me…_
> 
> _There's a flash of blinding white light. They ask him his name, but he can't respond, He can't hear. His ears burst, and the silence drowns over him again, and all he can hear is himself saying is Baekhyun, Baekhyun, Baekhyun..._

They disengage abruptly, and Chanyeol falls to his knees. He feels himself forgetting again; the last thing he hears is Jongdae’s voice, “I was afraid this would happen…”

* * *

Chanyeol awakes in his dormitory, away from the madness. He’s alone, and almost immediately he realizes that’s the last thing he wants right now. The silence of his room feels oppressive, and he subconsciously reaches out for his guitar to fill the void.

One he starts strumming out a melody he feels better, focusing on the notes flowing out, and how they are real and there is noise, but his mind feels strangely empty. All his thoughts are easy and soft, and that makes him feel more frantic, as if the murky weight of the drift was more natural. For a second he thinks of Jongin, but he realizes that’s the last thing he wants; he summons up images of everyone else he knows, but then Baekhyun’s comes, and his mouth is moving but it’s silent, and Chanyeol starts strumming faster to fill the air, to have something, anything –

“Chanyeol!” Sehun’s voice comes. He’s standing underneath Chanyeol’s door with Kyungsoo, and he looks so tiny it sickens Chanyeol. Compared to Kyungsoo, Sehun was always broader, taller, and more fit in almost every way, with stick straight posture and shoulders built for lifting; yet, underneath the door, the sickly aspect of Sehun’s new physique is all the more apparent, especially against the petite Kyungsoo.

“God,” Chanyeol sighs, exasperated. “You’re so skinny.”

“What?” Sehun asks.

“Sorry, I mean – I don’t know. When did you guys get here?”

“You were playing like a maniac,” Kyungsoo says as he walks in. “Are you ok?”

“Me?” Chanyeol responds. “I’m fine.”

Sehun looks to Kyungsoo. “Just because we aren’t in LOCCENT doesn’t mean we haven’t heard what happened.”

“It’s moments like these where I appreciate Jongdae’s sugar coating habits,” Chanyeol attempts to quip, but he hears the shakiness in his own voice undermining the joke.

“Look, Chanyeol, we’re not here to talk about the drift test,” Kyungsoo responds. “We just want to see if you’re ok.”

“I’m fine,” Chanyeol says almost reflexively, but he realizes that if anyone knows he isn’t fine, then it’s these three – two, two. _These two_ , he thinks. _Not threes._

Sehun is staring at him intensely. “Then why did you just drift off for two minutes?”

Chanyeol feels nervous, unsure how to answer, and then he realizes that there’s no point in lying. These are his two closest friends – and there’s no secrets out there for him, anyway. “I’m not fine,” he says at length.

“Breathe,” Kyungsoo says, and he rubs a comforting arm on Chanyeol’s back. “Breathe, slowly. Inhale with me, ok?” He smiles. “One, two, three, now exhale, one, two, three, four, five.”

Kyungsoo keeps counting and Sehun, though puzzled, joins them in a second. The three sit on the floor, breathing in and out, for several minutes.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah, I – I guess I panicked there,” Chanyeol responds, his voice still shaky but louder, closer to his normal tone.

“It’s natural,” Kyungsoo says, “you relived something you were afraid of reliving.” His colleague leans back, looking him square in the eyes. “There’s a risk of this happening again, but of course, with time and training, Jongin is less likely to chase the rabbit…” he trails off, but his gaze doesn’t leave Chanyeol, “…but also, you shouldn’t do something that hurts you this much.”

“No one is making you do this, Chanyeol,” Sehun says immediately. “I know you didn’t want to.”

“But I did,” Chanyeol admits before letting Sehun finish. “I did want to. I wanted this again.” He inhales, his shaky breath echoing in his bare room. “There wasn’t a question. This is my destiny, and I can’t escape it. How can I live if every time it rains I still think of those times? Even outside of a jaeger, I’m in my own drift.”

“Ugh,” Sehun groans, leaving away from his friend. “Now the songwriter comes out.” Kyungsoo shoots him a pointed look. “Ok, Jongdae.”

Chanyeol laughs, and it warms the room. “Am I being too much?”

“ _’I’m in my own drift,’_ ” Sehun mocks. “A little.”

Kyungsoo stiffens. “I get it, but that was a bit much.”

Chanyeol laughs, and laughs harder, until he can’t stop. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m so dramatic!”

“Sorry, that was mean…” Sehun trails out, and then he looks over at Kyungsoo, who stares back at him, though Chanyeol makes no note of it.

“No, it’s true,” Chanyeol says. “I can’t run forever, and I know, I know I want this. I’m going to get it. I’m going to learn to live with this, and I’m going to do this to make them proud.”

Sehun sighs. He looks to Kyungsoo, who finally nods in response, and, with a final pat on Chanyeol’s shoulder, moves out of the room. “Let me know if you need anything,” he says, before passing through door and dissolving back into the hallway.

“I didn’t know,” Sehun says the minute their companion shuts the door.

“Know what?” Chanyeol asks, confused.

“When we fought this morning,” Sehun says, looking down, “I didn’t know that the drift test was today, and I didn’t know it was with Renegade.”

“It’s not your fault,” Chanyeol says. “You’ve been gone.”

“Stop being so nice,” Sehun laughs, before looking back to his friend. His eyes are deep, pools, something he could drown in, just like the last time they spoke, that night in his dorm. _I know who you were, who you are, and I still love you…_ Chanyeol looks down, stares at the tiles on the floor, the silence ringing. _I still love you. I will always love you, oh, yes I do._ “You know, Chanyeol,” Sehun sighs, his voice quieter than usual, breaking Chanyeol from his internal monologue. “There are images you never forget. And I’ll never forget watching the TV as you held Baekhyun’s limp body. There was something in that that I’ll never understand, I can never even begin to say I get it. In that moment, I barely knew you, but I thought: this man, this man has lost the person he loves most, this man is a hero. I was holding Jongin’s hand as we watching, I remember holding it tighter, I thought, ‘How can I bring someone I love into this?’ When Jongin got injured I was relieved – is that wrong?” His voice is shaking, rocky, instead of clear and monotone. “I thought, well, this is my path but it’s better that it’s not his. I was scared. I was not good enough. _But you are._ ” Chanyeol snaps his head up to look Sehun in the eyes,

“You are the only person I will trust to care for Jongin, I hope you know that. Only you are good enough for him, and no one else. Just the same, I will only trust Jongin with you, because he’s the only person that will protect you,” Sehun says. He exhales, the sound of his breath echoing through the walls of Chanyeol’s room. “Even I couldn’t do that, and I love you,” he adds, his voice quieter. “You’re too good, too good for this world, you’ll get hurt with these good intentions. Someone needs to take care of you and your big heart.”

Sehun is angular with sharp edges and defined features. Where Jongin looks charming and warm, Sehun is cold and uninviting; but it’s his voice that does the opposite, it portrays nothing and everything all at once. It’s like honey, in that it’s not beautiful in the way that a voice should be but it is so uniquely his. Chanyeol tries to memorize every feature of Sehun’s in that moment before he goes and withers away, to disappear the way everyone does; the straight line of his broad shoulders, the narrow dip of his hip, the upward arch of his eyebrows. The plush form of his lips, all soft and pink; the slight ripple of remaining muscle down his arms; the angular shadows reflected across his collarbones.

“You left without saying goodbye,” Chanyeol says, looking back in his friend’s eyes. “I missed you.”

Sehun seems to bristle underneath the words. “You don’t have to say things you don’t mean to me anymore,” he almost whispers. “I already love you.”

Without thinking, Chanyeol reaches out and grabs Sehun’s hand. The touch of their fingers together seems almost charged with electricity, and it shocks them both; Sehun’s skin is warm, as if bristling with heat. Sehun moves towards Chanyeol instinctively, but then he looks away. Chanyeol moves closer, but Sehun puts a hand on his leg, stopping him.  

“I know that he’s the one you love,” Sehun says. “I don’t want that to change. Don’t do this…to avenge him…to kill the silence, or whatever, I don’t want you to…I don’t know what I’m saying, Chanyeol, but I want to be here for you, whatever you choose now, even though I know nothing is going to change. I need you to protect Jongin, so I need you to choose now, if you keep going or we stop, but either way, I’ll go with you.”

“Why do you want that?” Chanyeol asks.

“Because there’s nothing else that could make me happy, Chanyeol,” Sehun says, his voice dripping with sadness, “than spending what little time I have left with you.”

 

 

> _“You don’t have to, you know,” Chanyeol says. It’s July; the Shore Lucky incident was a few weeks ago, the wound scabbed over but still fresh. “You can still leave."_
> 
> _In response, Baekhyun sighs; he runs his fingers through his hair, newly dyed and trimmed, as if ready for the press conference; he doesn’t look his lover in his eyes. The silence weighs on them for a few minutes. Then, at length, he asks, “Do you remember when you told me that there was nothing else that would make you happy?”_
> 
> _“Than being a jaeger pilot,” Chanyeol answers, not missing a beat. “Yeah, I do.”_
> 
> _Baekhyun laughs, he sighs, his voice laced with melancholy. “I’ve never seen you hold on to anything like this. You like something, you pursue it, you spend days doing it, then something happens, you despair, you give up, you move on. That’s the way you’ve always been.”_
> 
> _Chanyeols snickers. “Bowling, snowboarding, yo-yoing…I know.”_
> 
> _“I was always afraid you’d do the same with me, you know.”_
> 
> _“You know I would never,” Chanyeol responds, indignant. “I couldn’t, I can’t.”_
> 
> _“I don’t know anything with you,” Baekhyun says._
> 
> _“I can say the same about you.”_
> 
> _“Anyone else could say that, but you can’t, so don’t lie. You should know by now you can’t lie to me,” Baekhyun sighs. “It’s funny,” he lets out a mirthless laugh, “I thought I had a destiny. And all I have instead is you.”_
> 
> _Silence. “I’m sorry,” Chanyeol says._
> 
> _“You should be,” Baekhyun snaps back. “Be sorry.” More silence. “Be sorry because you have filled my life with more than I wanted, and you have given me everything I wished, and it makes me wonder, what I could have dreamed of, before I met you,” he says. “And now all I know for certain is that the only thing that will make me happy is saving this world that I was once happy to passively let be destroyed. Be sorry because you turned me from a bystander to a martyr. Be sorry because you made me fall in love with you and now you’re stuck with me, be sorry because I feel all of this for you, and yet, you will get back in a jaeger, I watched you ruin your life, and I can’t stop you.” He inhales sharply, the silence punctuating the evening sky. The stars above shining over the ocean, reflecting the breach in their own existence. They still manage to fill Chanyeol with wonder: distant beings, unknowingly watching over their own destruction. “Be sorry because I love you too much, and you will never feel the same.”_
> 
> _Chanyeol breathes in, harshly, and searches for something to say – “I love you,” he forces out immediately, “more than any-“_
> 
> _“More than anything? No. Not more than this world you are so determined to save, even when you know it will kill you. And still, I’m not leaving, so I won’t let you either, because I know this is the only thing that will make you happy. I need to protect you, because you won’t protect yourself.” He exhales, his shaky breath dissolving into the humid night air. “This is all we have Chanyeol, each other and the drift and our duty. You are my destiny, and I will hate you forever for it.”_

In the back of his eyes, Chanyeol feels hot tears well up, bubbling over like they did the other day with Sayaka, and he starts sobbing – uncontrollably, like an unknown force seizing his body. Sehun immediately reaches his arms out to hold him, and, without thinking, Chanyeol moves in to kiss Sehun. His mouth is as soft as it has always looked: plush underneath his own, the feeling of his lips moving beside his, but Sehun pulls back suddenly, leaving Chanyeol confused.

“You can’t keep doing this to me,” Sehun snaps, unable to look back at Chanyeol.

“What am I doing?” Chanyeol asks back, his tear-stained cheeks pink and soft. He feels shocked: What on earth could possibly have gone wrong? He was certain until a few seconds ago that this is what Sehun wanted.

“You can’t keep giving me enough to have me stay, then telling me it means nothing. When you’re weak you think about me, when you’re strong I don’t cross your mind. There are things that we could still say to each other, even after all these years, but you act like we share the drift together.” He sighs, loudly but shakily. “I know I’m selfish,” Sehun says, holding his face in his hands, his upper body angled away from Chanyeol but their knees still touching, “but it’s not wrong of me to love you.”

“Look, Sehun, I know there’s a lot going on,” Chanyeol says immediately, and he reaches out a hang to his friend, but it’s brushed away. The lack of touch feels harsh and unexpected. “All the same, I can tell you one thing for sure, and it’s that I’m not trying to hurt anyone. I would never hurt you, no matter what, I don’t think I could-”

“Oh, Chanyeol,” Sehun coos. He lifts his head from his hands and looks his friend in the eyes. “You couldn’t hurt anyone if you wanted to. That’s what always made you different, during the apocalypse.”

Stunned, Chanyeol scrambles to find words, but then there’s a knock at the door. Sehun looks at him in the eyes one last time, before rising to open it, revealing Sunyoung.

“Pardon me, Ranger Park, Ranger Oh. Am I interrupting?” she asks innocently.

“No, Sunyoung,” Sehun says, shooting a lingering look at Chanyeol. “I was just leaving.”

* * *

“Ranger Park,” Marhsall Kwon says firmly. She inclines her head ever so slightly, and Sunyoung immediately leaves. She still manages to shoot the smallest look at Chanyeol as she exits, but instead of the typical glance she provides him – of pride, a wink, whatever it was – instead she seems only to linger, as if confused, fearful, trying to understand a man on the edge.

Chanyeol steps into the office tentatively.

“This isn’t your first rodeo Park, nor your second or third,” Marshall Kwon states, not mincing words. It’s always been her typical fashion to do this. She’s staring at the monitors, not at him, her eyes distant. He wonders where she is, what she’s feeling, because she’s certainly not here with him; the room she is in is not her office, not this November. “You have been doing this for years. Jongin has drifted twice, now three times. Is that comparable?” She scolds, her voice dropping. “You were on the dominant side, too. You should have been able to help him, reel him back in. But you were so loose, so nervous, that you just delved in with him.”

Chanyeol steps forward, his voice cracking. “Look, I-”

“You what?” she snaps at him, her chair whipping around to face him. The furrow of her brow is menacing, the disappointment dripping from her voice so disheartening that Chanyeol whimpers.

“He got lost in my memory!” he says, trying to defend himself, but he finds himself sputtering, his arms flailing around. “What am I to do about that? I barely know him!”

“That’s the problem, Ranger Park,” she clearly states. “You experienced something traumatic, and you keep it buried inside, then you expect someone to delve in your memories, see this awful hole, that is so intense it literally casts a shadow of your drift, and not get lost in it? You and Baekhyun could drift because you were friends for life, but how can you ever imagine Jongin to open up to you if you don’t let him in?” Marshall Kwon sighs, rubbing her temples with her hands; she removes her glasses, folding them neatly on her desk. “Jongin didn’t know what he was doing, but you did, and you could have prevented this,” she says at length, disappointed.

“I can’t deal with this, Boa!” Chanyeol exclaims, his face contorting into his wild expressions. “One second you’re there for me and one second you’re not. I can’t tell if you love me or if I’m just – just some object to you. You were my best friend. And this is hard. I’ve opened up to you, and now you’re telling me that I’m not doing enough?”

“Chanyeol,” she says, and her voice is softer. “I love you, and you can never say that I don’t. You are my son, my brother, my everything. But this base is my other child, and I’ve lost too much to have you playing games with it. You know what your parents meant to me, what Baekhyun meant to me, what Changmin meant to me, and to have you think that I don’t care…I don’t know. I don’t know but it hurts,” she adds, her voice trailing off. The exhaustion Chanyeol saw in her eyes those weeks ago when she asked him to find Wu has traveled to her voice, foreign and unbecoming, like a tongue he cannot parse. “I love you, Chanyeol, and I can’t have you do this unless you are willing to do your best, because otherwise I will lose you too. And when I lose you, there is no one else left for me here, and I know the base will fall to shambles, and the faith will go, and the kaijus will win.”

Rain is falling in his head, soft and unrelenting. He thinks of the Hong Kong skyline, of a summer five years ago, of a lover three past. The turn of autumn to winter reminds him of Jongin, soft, a façade of easiness; and the turn of winter to spring makes him think of Sehun, promise, hope, the easy dip of his hip, the sound of his voice when he sounds happy. Summer will always be Baekhyun; but these things come in circles, one giving to another. The rain stops and starts again, and here he is, over five years passed, standing in the office, looking for a reason to achieve his destiny.

That’s what it is, what it’s always been: destiny. From birth, he had been branded, and whatever he does he cannot escape it. The rain, the tempest, the renegade; who he really is, who he tried to be.

“This isn’t a game to me,” he asserts. “This is my last chance, my redemption. I have to fix what I broke, since this is all I have leflt.”

“Oh, Chanyeol,” she coos. “You could never hurt anyone, even if you wanted to.”

“Everyone says that,” he snaps back, running angry fingers through his hair. Rain drops to silence, silence to thunderstorms, red and grey and blue. “But no one means it, no one gets it, that I’m not good! I’ve tried for all these years to fix it, to do what I did, to look to save, but I can’t!” he nearly shouts, his eyes bursting outs of his head. He pulls at a clump of his hair. “I can’t fix this, I can’t find redemption in myself. I dragged everyone into this hole thinking it was my destiny and lost them all to my own foolishness!”

Marshall Kwon stands up, crossing the room to her pupil. She wraps her arms around him and he feels himself collapse in that strange embrace, sobs wracking his body. All this touch after years of isolation confuses him, but most of all, it feels like his mom’s arms, and he can’t find a way to escape it.

“Chanyeol, you can’t change anyone but yourself, but if you don’t love yourself enough to do the right thing, then love someone else enough to do it,” Boa whispers into his ear as she strokes his hair, letting him cry endless tears, soaking her blazer. “If you can’t trust yourself to make the best choices, then let your love of this world, and those you found in it, motivate you on a path to redemption. And remember that when your heat is heavy and filled with anger, in these others you can find strength to keep fighting, even if your own vendetta has been filled.”

“You know who told me that?” she asks. “You did. All those years ago.” She continues to stroke his hair, her delicate fingers running through his overgrown locks. “You don’t need redemption, and there’s no such thing as destiny. But Chanyeol, if I’ve ever seen a star, it’s you.” He thinks of a newscrawl, of the way he stared at the jaegers as a child, of Shore Lucky bathed in golden light. A star, a god, three of them. Gods in shining white armor, standing over their kingdom. She pulls away from him, keeps her hands on his arms, looks him in the eye. “I just need you to make a choice. I know you will choose the right one.”

In her eyes, he realizes that despite all the pain, there is nothing else left for him to dwell on; she looks at him, brown eyes pooling beneath her lashes, glistening in the artificial light, and all he sees is responsibility. Duty: what he has to do, fulfill his destiny, redeem himself – and someone else, who’s getting tangled up in this regardless of what happens.

“I do want this,” he declares firmly, the tears finally stopping.

“Are you sure?”

He sighs, his voice still shaky from sobbing. “Yes, I’m sure. This is my duty and my destiny. My parents didn’t die for me to be a coward, and Baekhyun didn’t die for me to live in eternal sorrow. This isn’t who I am.”

“You don’t need to use their deaths as justification,” she says.

“Yes, I do,” he interrupts her. “I mean, I need there to be a reason so that I can understand it better. And it won’t last forever but I need it for now. I have to fix this. And I have to protect Jongin, because no one else will. This is our last chance. I know what must be done.”

She touches his chin with her delicate fingers. “Thank you.”

* * *

“Shore Lucky isn't your jaeger.”

Chanyeol glances up to see Jongin peering his head in through his door. The incident was several days prior, but the two haven’t had a chance to talk – Chanyeol needed some time away from the base first. With his soft puppy dog eyes and shaggy locks, Chanyeol can’t help but feel so much affection for Jongin deep in his heart, and the sight of him warms his soul. Jongin is a boy, and Chanyeol – not a man, but maybe a senior, someone older and more calloused and worn. “Ah, Jongin, come in,” Chanyeol responds. He pats a place on his bed beside him, gesturing the younger boy over. “I'm sorry about the other day.”

Quietly, Jongin slithers through the door in one languid movement and shuts it behind him, before loping over to Chanyeol’s bed. Every move he makes is easy, gentle, agile, yet Chanyeol can feel the heaviness in his steps that wasn’t present before the drift test. The weight, he reckons, of knowing too much. “It was my fault. I shouldn't have – I shouldn't have caught myself up in your memories, and mine,” Jongin admits as he settles down beside his partner. Without his bravado, he is just a boy: muscled and broad but young and innocent. Chanyeol almost can’t recognize this softness, it reminds him of the boy from the night in the hospital bays with Sehun, not the one he fought relentlessly in the kwoon room for weeks, the one that hurled a sparring stick at his back from twenty meters.

Not that he’s one to judge, of course.

“No, Jongin,” Chanyeol sighs. He angles himself towards his partner. “It’s my fault. I carry too much into the drift. It's hard to drift with a former pilot if they don't control their emotions well. It's why Zitao can't…and it’s why I probably shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, well, I…wanted to know,” Jongin admits in an undertone, shrugging. “I mean, I knew, but…I guess I didn’t know. I don’t know.” He chuckles, putting Chanyeol at ease. “There’s something about being able to see all this stuff from someone you idolized, and you can’t help but wonder, even if I knew I shouldn’t.” The brown-eyed pilot looks up at the ceiling, as if searching for something. “You were that Park Chanyeol, you know? And I wanted to see all these things in your head. Because I knew the Park Chanyeol on TV screens, and I guess I wanted to know the one that I trained with a little better. Even when you let me in, it still felt like you were blocking me out.”

Chanyeol smirks a little. “I know. And I understand - sometimes you just want to know. Marshall Kwon once told me the space between who you pretend to be and who you are is where the real you lies.”

Jongin nods, before leaning in a little closer to Chanyeol, relaxing himself into the bed. “I know it's wrong to ask, maybe but, I guess maybe if I know, it will work next time. If there will be a next time.”

“There will be,” Chanyeol promises. “It’s not a choice for me, not anymore.”

Jongin smiles slightly, his eyes looking back to Chanyeol, boring holes in his head. “Me either. It never was.”

Chanyeol wriggles under Jongin's gaze. “Do you really want to know?”

“If you don't mind telling me,” Jongin says. “I want this to work with you.”

Sighing, Chanyeol straightens up, contrasting his posture against Jongin’s. “I’m going to do this the right way, then, the start to finish way. Take notes so you can write my autobiography,” he adds with a laugh, feigning lightheartedness. Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, he steadies his mind and reaches into the part of his self that he often tries to forget about. Deep in a recess, one where he had his youth, his happiness, his loss. “As you know, the pilots of Shore Lucky were my parents,” he begins, his voice stable and calm, its deep timbre unwavering. “It's been less than a decade, but I grew up watching them drop. I honestly can’t tell you what I did with my life before I came to the base, and I don't know what I'll do when it's over. When I think about it, Shore Lucky was...is my childhood.”

“Ok,” Jongin says, and his reassurance steadies Chanyeol further. This is his narrative, he determines, his history to be written. One day. When he saves the world.

Which he will.

Chanyeol smiles. “Shore Lucky was my jaeger as much as it was theirs; I learned all my skills on her. Renegade is considered Lucky's child, that's why she's mine. I'm treated special because of it, you know, and it burns a bit because I never know if people think I'm talented or they just like me because I'm a base brat with famous parents who lost his partner. But whatever it is, I know – I know on the inside I’m good at being a ranger.” Jongin chuckles at his confidence, and Chanyeol smiles back. “So it’s kind of disconnected; sometimes I think, wow, I’m only here because I’m Shore Lucky’s son, the academy only let me in for that reason, Marshall Kwon only loves me for that reason. Then you think about it, and I think about the interviews and the specials and – I know that I was maybe some ploy to be, you know, like no, jaegers are good, this is working; but I was good at it. Independent of it. I was…Park Chanyeol. Ten years on the base made me good at it. I know a jaeger inside and out, even when I was grounded, I never forgot any of it.”

Jongin coughs uncomfortably. “So you...?”

“Were here when they died?” Chanyeol finishes his partner’s sentence, but he looks away, his mind drifting off. “Yeah.” _Summertime, with the rain falling_ ; the images pass through his brain vividly. _Alone, off the coast of their own city._ “Five years ago. First category III, a freak accident, 1 on 1 battle in a typhoon.” _Plucked from their jaeger, like ragdolls._ “It was too much, there was no backup, they were far from shore.” _Blood on the monitors, blood on TV._ “They were more focused on keeping him away from the shore, out of the miracle mile, and stalled too long. They died instead of running.” _Blue and gray, a dark horizon, a broken god, luckless ocean, tide to shore._ “You know the story. It's famous. _'Jaeger pilots die in heroic sacrifice._ ' As if they weren't already heroic by being jaeger pilots.” He feels warmth in the back of his throat, but quells it. _An idol broken down in the sea, its heart torn from its chest_. “I shouldn't complain.” _They’re gone, Chanyeol._ “I watched them get pulled out of their jaeger on live television.” _Save them from their imminent tragedy._ “I saw it the way everyone else did _._ ” _Like the world isn’t ending, like they had the strength to stop it._ “They were already superstars, and now they always will be.”

Chanyeol sighs again, yet he doesn’t feel tears. For the first time in years, he relates this tale – the one of his own undoing, the beginning of this endless, endless tragedy that has haunted him, what turned him onto the path of a living ghost – with a cool, detached demeanor. He’s soft, always has been; yet now, he feels hardened, alive. Jongin’s presence is warmer now, and though he knows the boy is beside him, he can’t look him in the eyes. These memories are in his own drift, one that exists only for him, in the back of his head, and it’s always raining here. “What people don't know, though, is that my parents were dying long before that. It was radiation poisoning – Shore Lucky was a Mark I. They could manage it for a while, but the mental strain and exposure was killing them slowly. It's nice for the textbooks, to have them always be young and strong, but I know the truth.” He sighs. “And I always will.”

“And yet you still...?”

“Became a pilot?”

“Is this what the drift is like?” Jongin laughs.

“Yeah,” Chanyeol chuckles, finally looking back at his friend. “I did. This base is my home. Even then, I knew I couldn't go back after seeing what I had seen. I was eighteen and already in the academy with Baekhyun. Couldn't turn back, and didn't want to either.” He takes a deep breath. “When your parents are Shore Lucky's team, you've got a lot to live up to. I decided to live up to it. It didn't really work, but I had someone by my side who was ready to risk it all to have me follow this dream, and with all of that, being me, knowing what I’m capable of, I knew it was my destiny.” Staring at the cold cement walls, he hears in his head the chiming voice of his soulmate. “Worst of all, he did too.”

“Baekhyun,” Jongin echoes quietly.

“The one and only.” A smile. “We piloted Renegade together, for about two years, as you know. We were a match made in heaven, they would say. Seven kills, almost a record, only three teams have more.”

“And you loved him.”

“More than anything. We grew up together, you know. He used to always tell me-”

“That you were the one that opened up his heart.”

Chanyeol lets out a melancholy chuckle. “Yeah. But he doesn't know, that he did the same to me. He wrenched my heart open and put too much in there. I was fine before, I was...I was good, I was happy, I was popular and everyone loved me. But Baekhyun was here with me, growing up, from Seoul to the bays, and he was everything to me. We finished each others’ sentences and pulled the same pranks and always knew how to lie our way out of every situation. We both talked too much and did a lot of terrible things but I really loved him.” Chanyeol feels his heart contract in his chest, and it burns deep down in a part of himself that has only ached for the past three years. “I never said it before, because no one got it, but I loved him so much. And growing up, with Baekhyun, you don't get to know silence. Sometimes you want to sock him for it, but sometimes it's so wonderful, to have this little chatterbox just going on next to you, and laughing at his jokes. I loved him so much for that. He was my other half.”

Jongin breathes, and Chanyeol can feel a weight come out of him, but he doesn’t understand why. He wanted the truth, and this is it.

“So if you're wondering why it took me so long to get back in a jaeger,” he announces, almost, and tries to keep talking before his nerves overtake his sudden bravado, “here it is: it's not because of...me losing everyone. It's an occupational hazard, I knew that going in, I knew that growing up. I told Boa that when my parents died – that the academy is made to break you, and how can you really pilot if you’re not broken?” He laughs. “What kind of an idiot _wants_ to risk their life?” Jongin chuckles a bit in response. “I knew all the stakes, but I didn't understand just how much of it could really leave. I thought I saw the bottom, when my parents died, but I didn't know that with true rock bottom comes silence. That's why I couldn't come back, because I can't deal with it being just Chanyeol ever again, the way it was. They don't tell you this in the academy, but if someone dies when you're drifting, there's just...nothingness. An emptiness that doesn't leave. I need people, I need people to distract me, I need friends and chatterboxes and I needed Baekhyun, to fill this silence. Without him I'm just Chanyeol.”

He takes a deep inhale. “But I'll get back, soon enough. I just need to stop letting it pull me in. I know that there’s a world out here, and I can’t stop trying to save it just because it hurt me. It’s my duty.”

Jongin places a hand on Chanyeol’s leg, and finally they lock eyes. Something stirs inside Chanyeol that he hasn’t felt in – well, years. It’s one of these confusing emotions that he has forgotten how to feel, something that starts in the pit of his stomach and makes him feel warm, but it’s not the feeling from when Sunyoung called him Ranger Park, or the feeling from when he saw Wufan – no, it’s something completely different. Jongin’s eyes are creamy and still, warm and inviting, a beautiful deep brown that looks into Chanyeol’s soul. He thinks of the drift, of the fog and the rain and how far away he felt from everything that had ever made him feel at home for all these years. The warmth of Commander Kwon’s arms around him the last time he hugged her also comes to mind – how long has he gone without that kind of contact? Of course, he hugs Sehun and Kyungsoo and Krystal and Vivi, but there’s something about this that’s different, something about the emotion that rides in this moment – something more, something that he feels when he spends time with the woman who was his first love, and the boy that was his real one. _The same feeling that washes over him when Sehun says he loves him?_ Maybe. He’s never been sure.

Subconsciously, Chanyeol finds himself leaning closer to Jongin, and in response, Jongin crawls closer to him, inching forward on his bed. It’s intimate, and it’s quiet, and it feels almost like a betrayal, but the warmth is overriding Chanyeol’s ability to think.

“It's ok, take your time,” Jongin says, as he slowly lowers his head onto Chanyeol’s shoulder, breaking their eye contact. “The world isn’t ending yet.”

 _But it is, Jongin,_ he wants to say. _It's ending as we speak._

“Do you ever forget? The silence,” Jongin asks from his place on Chanyeol’s shoulder. “Are there moments where it goes away?”

Chanyeol looks to his hands. “I can still feel the way Baekhyun felt, and the way I felt to him. And when I close my eyes...I still feel his body in my arms, limp on the beach, the blood dried and cold. I can't ever forget it. Baekhyun was a part of me and now he's gone, but when you drift with me, you drift with Baekhyun too. I'm not like Zitao; I can't just carry nothing into the drift. I carry all of this into the drift. So when I ask you to do this with me, you're doing it with Baekhyun too, because I can't let him go.”

“Do you still love him?” Jongin whispers.

Chanyeol pauses, hesitant. He thinks of every moment with Baekhyun, fifteen years they spent together. He thinks of the days before the kaijus, when they played out in the streets. Baekhyun wanted to sing, and Chanyeol wanted to follow him. They would sit around and tune his guitar to the sound of Baekhyun's voice, not because it made sense, but merely because they could.

He thinks of the attack on San Francisco, the way he ran to Baekhyun’s house, how they watched it in terror, and he knew that his parents would go to save the world. Some time would pass before the jaeger program would start, naturally, but even then he knew that his parents were not pacifists in a war against the unknown. Even moreso, he realized he was the son of heroes, and it was his destiny to follow them.

Baekhyun knew too, and in the drift they would share that moment: Baekhyun looked at Chanyeol on that day when the Golden Gate bridge was smashed to pieces, orange metal littering the San Francisco bay where the bodies of men who built it had fallen to the same fate, eternity and mortality officially on a level playing field and he realized with horror that Chanyeol was going to save the world – at any cost.

Chanyeol thinks of the attack on Seoul, clutching Baekhyun in his arms, feeling the boy tremble beneath him. He had always been smaller, more lightweight, but more in control; and there he was, trying to keep Baekhyun close to him. Two weeks later, his parents left for the Hong Kong base, Chanyeol and Yura in tow.

When Chanyeol moved to the base with his parents, he only ever left to see Baekhyun, and Baekhyun was his only visitor. He remembers the day on the beach, when Baekhyun promised to follow him. There was the blood and sweat and tears of the academy, watching in awe as Shore Lucky scored another kill, waiting, watching, yearning for the chance to defend his parents, to be on that screen with them, to save everyone. And Baekhyun wanted it too, for no other reason than to be with Chanyeol.

He remembers Baekhyun holding him as they watched his parents get ripped from Shore Lucky, thrown carelessly into the ocean, like little ragdolls. That night Baekhyun sang to him, his voice soft and beautiful, and he wondered how lucky he was to have his other half beside him...

He remembers how it felt to have his heart be ripped in half as Baekhyun's stopped beating. He remembers the silence more than anything, the incessant absence of a part of him he could never imagine losing; the quieting of the voice inside his head, whether in the drift or in their dorm, singing of love and light and little jokes. How Baekhyun was always a trickster, a prankster, pushing buttons and limits, and when that silence enveloped him, Chanyeol never found a way to fully fill it ever again, because no one is quite like Baekhyun, or ever will be. Sehun could spend a thousand years speaking of his dog and toys and bratty remarks, and still, nothing could ever compare to five minutes with his love.

_And I was cursed to be born during the apocalypse…_

Is there a world, Chanyeol has always wondered, where they are together? Where, given a different life, they were born in different circumstances, to be stable and still?

Would they still have ended up together? Would the moments they shared, so intimate and private, have meant the same, without the imminent tragedy hanging over their heads?

Chanyeol wonders, most of all, if they would have been so immensely in love had their own mortality not been so clearly established. He knows they would have, but perhaps not the same, not in the desperate, fleeting way that he still holds onto the smallest sunlit days. Somedays, that’s what his life is now; and he’s tired of it. He’s tired of always wondering what universe allows him to hold Baekhyun until the end of the eternity. It exists somewhere in the drift, he is sure, but it’s not enough, to search for something he isn’t sure he can find.

“I will always love Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says. “Always, as in, today, tomorrow, forever. He's a part of me that I can never get rid of. But...”

Jongin stiffens.

“I spent years haunting these halls, missing, wishing, praying to have another chance, to have Baekhyun back. I drowned in sadness, I...I was so _lonely_...but Baekhyun, he's...he's possessive, and jealous, and so full of brightness...and even knowing that he...he is waiting for me...I know...I know he would want me to move on. I know that I will always _love_ him. More than is good for me, because he's literally a part of me; but I am no longer _in love_ with him.”

Jongin looks at him, his deep brown eyes, and smiles. Chanyeol wonders if he knew, all this time, the game he was playing; like two fools playing charades, dancing around the truth.

“You still want to get back in a jaeger, even after all of this?” he asks.

Jongin nods. “Yes.”

Chanyeol looks down, nervous.

“You know, I get the drift now,” Jongin says. Chanyeol colors, uncomfortable as to where this is going. He looks up quitly, and Jongin is smiling.

“I’ve never been good at ceding, but…sometimes, you have to admit that two people may belong together,” Jongin says, calmly. “Maybe there’s less time to say something than you think.”

Chanyeol laughs. “Sometime during the last three years I forgot the urgency of it all.”

“There’s no time better than now,” Jongin says back. “Isn’t that what we learn in every iteration of this story?”

* * *

“There you are.”

Marshall Kwon’s office, near the top of the base, overlooks an expanse of the building that mostly serves as a landing pad for helicoptors, a place to pile old kaiju parts while Kyungsoo scrambles to find storage units for them, and an occasional romantic rendezvous point for scorned couples of Hong Kong. It’s not a beauteous place, nor a special one: it’s hard concrete for about 300 meters, and a harsh drop after that. The sky is always an inky black, uncluttered by the stars that could be seen in the rest of the world.

Still, it always filled Chanyeol with wonder – to stare at the horizon of the city and the edge of the world. To know that somewhere out in that broad expanse of ocean lies the breech, the rip that altered the course of human history. And maybe somewhere out there lies the drift, too; a collection of all the broken humans like himself that dedicated their lives to fighting an evil that may win anyway.

A long time ago, he used to visit here with Baekhyun. They would watch the choppers land and bring in new recruits or pieces of kaiju toenails, watch the flickering lights of the city go on and off, watch other jaegers be carried off for battle. The insignificant and the life-altering all pass through herel even their lives, too, had started by being choppered in to this very slab of hard concrete. Then Baekhyun left, and he watched alone, wishing that there was a place out there where he could find them all, ever last thing, wondering what he had to risk to get there – the one cost he was willing to pay.

Sehun turns to Chanyeol, Vivi perched in his lap. The poodle pops up and trots over, licking Chanyeol’s knees in excitement, to which Chanyeol coos. “I knew you’d be here.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because you’re the only person that listens to everything I say, even when it’s stupid,” Chanyeol responds, settling in next to the younger boy. It’s chilly out, so he scoots closer to Sehun. “I’m cold,” he adds.

“Look where it got me,” Sehun quips back, but he doesn’t pull away from Chanyeol’s touch.

They sigh, sitting in silence for some time. Vivi yips once or twice, eliciting giggles from them both.

“I never thought I would end up here,” Sehun says at length.

Chanyeol looks at him from the side of his eye. “What do you mean?”

“Caught up over you,” he responds, before he breaks into self-deprecating laugther. “I sound like a pop song.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chanyeol asks back, but he’s laughing too.

“Oh, come on,” Sehun says back. “You play this game of being a sad puppy, but when I think about it, you’ve always – you’ve always had a game to play, you get everyone into you, stuck on it, collected. Me, Jongin, Baekhyun. All of us, and plenty of others, just willing to play.”

“I loved Baekhyun more than anything in the world,” Chanyeol quickly responds, hurt. “You can’t say anything but that.”

“How can you even argue that you loved him more? Baekhyun followed you to his death.” Chanyeol says nothing, but he’s seething. “He knew there was no other way it would end, he wasn’t naïve. He watched you grieve over your parents radiation poisoning, watched you believe that you could live long enough to be a hero. And yet he still followed, because he _loved_ you.” Sehun sighs. “And now that I think about it, I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same. How many times can you-”

“Fuck off, Sehun,” Chanyeol says through gritted teeth.

“Fuck off, Chanyeol,” Sehun says immediately back. “Can’t you tell when someone loves you? I can’t keep waiting and hoping only to see that you’ll never love anyone but Baekhyun. It’s not fair. I love you. I’ve been here. But it’s not enough, is it? How many times can you tell me no before I finally fucking get it, or you finally leave me alone?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re everything to me,” Sehun nearly shouts. “I mean it. I have meaning and purpose but everywhere I go, I find you. Everything, this entire world, eternally back to you: you take my partner, my purpose, my dog – Vivi, even, it’s just. It’s madness. You’ve been my best friend and everytime I try to escape these feelings, know you can’t reciprocate, you show up. You’re my world. And I say this now because I know it won’t change anything.”

“Sehun, I’m here because – because I want to be with you,” Chanyeol says back, grabbing the younger boy by his shoulder. “I’ve been running for so long but I get it now, I get all of it. I get how I always felt. That there was this current between us I didn’t want to acknowledge, because I didn’t want to hurt you, I wasn’t ready and I didn’t want to put you through that – and in the end, I still did.”

Sehun crumples under Chanyeol’s gaze. “But you are going to hurt me, Chanyeol, even now you still will.”

Taken aback, Chanyeol jolts away. “What does that mean?” he asks, incredulous.

“Jaeger pilots don’t retire,” Sehun says, staring at the endless, starless sky. “We die.”

“You didn’t.”

“I almost did,” he says right back. “And in some ways, it was a relief. I wanted to save the world and I knew there was no way out other than through death. I thought this was our chance to be – to get away from the base, to that midwestern bar you tell me about. You and me, and Jongin and Vivi. We could try again, somewhere safe. Because what’s the point of this all, in the end? It’s madness, getting up and fighting monsters that just keep getting stronger.” Sehun tenses up, his breathing becoming labored in seconds. “And then you stood up and decided to do just that; I knew there was no future for us then.”

Chanyeol sighs; he wraps his arms around Sehun, who dissolves quickly into sobs. He’s right, of course; Sehun often is, even when you least expect it. Age has not made Chanyeol the wiser. Once again, Chanyeol finds himself with a person he loves, who has found out who he really is. Is there a world after the kaijus? He hopes so. Yet in all this time, he’s refused to see it; his life is the Pan-Pacific Defense Force, decided by fate, and locked in with three deaths. If destiny means anything, maybe it means that there has to be one more sacrifice before it can go on. Sehun’s pooling brown eyes look sad and distant; he knows the truth here, always has.

In the future though, it’s foggy, but Chanyeol sees an image: not of a midwestern bar, or a newscrawl, but a house in the city, of a dog, of a man that he loves. Of a sunny summer day, rare, but not unheard of. The humidity sticking to his skin as he plays the piano, a man beside him reading a book, plants growing across the walls, the smell of jasmine tea floating in the air. It’s peaceful in a way that is languishing and eternal, not effervescent and furtive. There’s all the time in the world, forever, for now, for whichever matters most.

Most of all, it’s not a petite partner beside him; it’s a lanky boy with a white poodle. For the first time, his future isn’t written with Baekhyun. Maybe it hasn't been for a while. Maybe he was refusing to see it. 

“Sehun, Sehun,” he coos in his ear. “Can you trust me to be the exception?”

Pulling back, the former pilot looks at his friend, his dark eyes glittering with tears, sadness becoming his face. His angular features never suited crying; and yet, Chanyeol loves him even more now, enough that he can’t hold it in any longer.

“I’ll always trust you,” Sehun promises. “Even when I know I shouldn’t.”

“All we have is now, all we have is this, there’s no point in us suffering for no reason,” Chanyeol declares. “We have each other. We love each other. You suffered for me, I suffered for you. I’ve come to far to let this go. I will get back in that jaeger, and I will come out the other side. I’ll deliver Jongin safe to you. I’ll deliver myself safe to you.”

“I know you don’t believe me,” Chanyeol continues on, “and maybe I don’t believe myself,” he adds, his voice certain and clear but lacking bravado. “I would die for this cause, and I always will. You would do the same. Perhaps for a while I settled on a fate worse than death, some kind of punishment for myself, too scared to determine which way to go, so I became a ghost. Maybe that’s true.” He gulps. “The thing is, I used to say I will die for this, but now it’s just that I _would_. I want there to be a world after this. I’ve seen darkness so deep it has pulled me in, it has sucked the life out of me but I’ve also seen greatness. I want to see the world after this, the one that promised me that same greatness. I want to see its kindness in the face of evil. I want to spend a Sunday morning with you on the porch and think it could last forever.” To his side, he feels Sehun start to shake, and he reaches out to pull his friend into his chest.

“Chanyeol, what will I do about you?” Sehun asks, his voice choked up and hoarse, sobs racking his frail frame. “So much goodness still left. Your heart's too big Chanyeol, you'll get hurt one day, and you'll hurt me loving you all the same."

“Sehun, I can’t play this game with you,” he says into the man’s ear, but his arms remain tight around him. “I might die for this. It’s more likely than not. But if I don’t, then I do want to keep living. I want it with you. You’re the only person who has loved me even when I couldn’t love myself. You turned a ghost back into a man. You waited for me even when I was in purgatory. I want the rest of eternity with you.”

Carefully, Chanyeol pulls back and looks Sehun directly in his eyes. They lean in together slowly, carefully, their lips brushing over gently at first, but then with more passion and ferocity. In the kiss there is years of friendship, of longing, of one-sided love, dreams left unspoken, furtive glances in the kwoon room, days spent wishing to see each other’s faces, futures unchased in fear of how empty their unfulfillment could leave them. The two of them, their soft lips against each other, the pads of Chanyeol’s finger tips brushing the spot below Sehun’s ear, together at last.

Without warning, the red blare of a siren begins wailing in the distance.

* * *

“Chanyeol!” Jongin yells down the hallway. The boy is distressed; his hair mussed up, his eyes heavy with sleep, still tired from the drift. Chanyeol is pounding down through the base, Sehun not far behind.

“Jongin, let’s go,” he yells at his partner, breathlessly, before taking his hand in his own and pulling him towards the Shatterdome. “You know what we have to do.”

Their strides pound down the hallway until they burst into a run, darting through clusters of technicians and officers. Chanyeol sees Jinyoung from the day in the kwoon room all that time ago yelling at a friend; Sunyoung rushing through the corridor, her arms full of papers; Jiho yelling at his lackeys, who follow obediently in his wake. His life, this moment, each person harried and frantic yet managing to move around each other in a coordinated dance only explained by the sheer urgency of the situation. The three arrive at the LOCCENT center in a frazzled mess. Dozens of employees are scrambling around, tapping furiously on their keyboards. _Category IV, approaching Hong Kong, Name: Struzion._ Marshall Kwon is near the front of he room, her eyes staring at graphics that Kyungsoo is showing her.

“Renegade Tempest can run backup,” Chanyeol declares, his voice certain, as he approaches the cluster of executives.

“Ranger Park, Ranger Kim, Ranger Oh,” Marshall Kwon says, her eyes not leaving the screen. “Hellfire Sigma will be protecting the city, and then we will have back up from Tokyo and Nagasaki flown in as soon as possible.”

“Hellfire Sigma is not enough for a Category IV, we both know that, Yixing and Minseok are in Lima, and the nearest jaegers can’t be deployed for another two hours at the absolute soonest,” Chanyeol asserts. “Let us help.”

“You failed a drift test three days ago,” Commander Jung begins, edging in from the side of the conversation, where she is viewing a display with Jongdae. “We cannot in good faith have the two of you-”

“Let us do it!” Chanyeol roars at Boa, turning away from Krystal, astounded by the bravado in his voice.

“I can’t, Chanyeol!” Marshall Kwon, her façade of calm cracking immediately. “I will not lose you after all these years!”

“You lost me on that rainy day in Hong Kong, five years ago!” Chanyeol shouts back. Jongin and Sehun step back, uncertain of the anger wracking their normally placid, goofy partner. “You lost me once I got back in that jaeger, you lost me once I refused to leave!” The entire LOCCENT center is staring now. “You and I both know I was willing to die for this cause from before I knew what to live for! And now I have something to live for, and I know I need to protect it! I need to protect all of this world, Jongin needs to protect it, this is our destiny!” he shouts back, beginning to storm towards the door. “Now get the LOCCENT techs ready, because I didn’t wait all this time to stand around and do nothing.”

“No,” she says furtively. “No, Chanyeol, I can’t –”

“Yes, you can,” he asserts as he strides to the door. He turns to face her. “Every single person here is ready to die for this cause. When the world ends, I want it to be because I fought. And believe me, I’m good at fighting.” He winks at Sehun, and then, with power and precision, he swings open the door to the LOCCENT center. “Are you ready Jongin?”

Life or death. A kaiju near Hong Kong. Category IV.  All but one jaeger down. Destruction around the corner. The skyline clear and certain.

Jongin follows behind him. “I’m ready.”

The rest passes by in a blur. They suit up quickly, aided by astounded J-Tech members who cannot believe that the failures of that afternoon were to spend the night defending the miracle mile. But that’s life in times of war – hasn’t it always been?

“Are your ready for this?” Chanyeol says, grabbing Jongin by his armored shoulder.

“Yes,” he says back.

“Remember, Jongin – you do not fight to kill. You fight to save,” Chanyeol offers him a warm smile. “You fight for the reprieve that comes when the monster is gone. The calm after the storm…you fight for the brisk fall afternoons that signify the end of summer storms. You fight for small moments on the base and the hope that your friends will not have to risk their lives by dropping again. You fight for every second and every day you get to spend with those you love, and you fight for the feeling in the drift where you get to relive every memory, and you fight. You fight to save this world that gave us each other.” He wraps his arm around Jongin’s neck, pulling their heads together so their foreheads touch.

“Don't fight for revenge. Fight for salvation. When the drift is empty, you've just got to keep searching. Run through memories until you find the warmth. Run through them until you find Sehun and your mom and your sister, until you find me, and remember why we do this, and I will dig for you, and it will be ok, because this is all we have, but it’s enough.” The two close their eyes in a brief moment, before moving apart.

“Let’s do this, partner,” they say in unison.

They ascend into the connpod; their helmets fill with fluid, and drain. They snap into their positions. Chanyeol looks up at the LOCCENT center and sees them again – his guardian angels. Hellfire Sigma is in front of them, on the other end of the Shatterdome, being lifted out by a helicopter. Rain is falling into the base through the opening in the ceiline as Hellfire ascends, higher and higher, until she fades in the darkness.

All eyes on Tempest, for the second time today.

“Initiating neural handshake,” Krystal states over the intercom.

“Initiating neural handshake,” Jongdae echos.

And once again, they are pulled in without a second more to think. Memories begin to race by, in a panicked manner at first, but the cloudy rain isn’t there; it’s warmer, inviting…

 

 

> _Jongin is huddled in the corner of a practice room, speaking on the phone. Chanyeol hears Sehun's voice coming through the other line._
> 
> _“It's nothing like the academy, Jongin, the people here are different,” Sehun says. “Like, really different.”_
> 
> _“How so?” Jongin breathes. He's in the room, and Chanyeol can see the edges of bandages sticking out of his shirt._

_“They don't smell as bad as you do, for one…”_ Chanyeol hears from the receiver, as the scene slowly dissolves into the hospital bays, sterile clean, but a different cast around the edges _._

 

 

> _“You don't know what Chanyeol used to be like,” says a bed-ridden Sehun. “Before he was so wild, he was the light of the room. It was so annoying. I hated it. And when he was with Baekhyun...it was a whole other story. No one even noticed me when it was those to. It's so annoying.” Sehun draws out the last syllable._
> 
> _“What was he like, this Baekhyun?” Jongin asks._
> 
> _"_ _They were…before he died...He was like Chanyeol but worse, maybe...or maybe more honest. I don't know. Chanyeol's weird, you know. You think you get all of him and then you realize maybe it's not all you think it is. Baekhyun was what he was. And very little else.”_

The images dissolve in and out; the stage of a large concert hall. The feeling of catching a woman in his arms. The pain in the toes of his feet from pointe shoes. The laughter of school days, a younger looking Sehun with longer hair amongst a group of other boys. A warm and inviting home; a meal set, with family and a sister. All of these scenes pass and dissolve within a second, yet Chanyeol can feel each one, can feel them linger and draw out the way a summer afternoon does, can feel the way Jongin’s lithe body maneuvered around these situations, as if Chanyeol has been gifted with an understanding of grace for the second time in his life. A long forgotten feeling, coursing through his veins, bringing with it nostalgia and hope.

Jongin passes through, his body close enough that Chanyeol can feel it, but not touch it. They both feel the warmth of Baekhyun's arms around them, a furtive embrace. _I love you,_ Baekhyun sings, _I'll always love you._ Tides pull in and out as Baekhyun’ face dissolves into the image of Kyungsoo and Jongdae at the funeral. Then it turns to the base, and Krystal is helping shave Chanyeol’s scraggly beard as he weakly smiles at her. He sees Chanyeol and Kyungsoo dancing silly at a party; he sees Chanyeol embracing Sehun after he returns from his first kill with Electra Mira. Everything is flickering by, and it feels warm and nostalgic, nowhere near as frightening and murky as their first drift; it brings him closer to Chanyeol with every moment that he sees.

“You’re doing good, boys,” Krystal calls out over the intercom. “Stay steady, and we will get ready to lift you up.”

Chanyeol nods, but then another memory comes through: Marshall Kwon asking him to pilot again. He catches only the image of the relentless rain pouring outside of her circular office, and he looks again to see an ever-younger Boa, and an ever-younger Chanyeol. It tempts him. The image is grey and murky, so he moves closer to see it.

 

 

> _“They're gone, Chanyeol."_
> 
> _Marshall Kwon is looking at Chanyeol from her chair in her office, the skyline blurring into a downpour, but he can't hear her. All he can hear is the taps of raindrops on the roof, mercilessly, beating down without relent._
> 
> _He knew it, of course. Knew it before she called him up. Gegrane was a Category III, the first of its kind. Off the coast of South Korea, their home. They never stood a chance...even he had known, watching his parents die on screen in a spectacle like a sports game. Everyone had looked at him with the same aghast aspects as Shore Lucky's cannon failed to fire. His parents, ripped from their own jaeger, torn to pieces on international television._
> 
> _They were heroes._
> 
> _And they died small, alone, off the coast of their own city, right in front of their son's eyes, trying to save time, trying to save people that they loved, their noses bleeding, their own mortality already established._
> 
> _It still hurts, though. Somewhere deep inside, hearing that they're really gone...it's not the same, not the same as...as watching it, hoping maybe...where does he go, when this happens? His life is the Pan Pacific Defense Force; he hasn't...he hasn't been away from the base for more than a week since he was fourteen. Five years...five years waiting for his moment...to support his parents, to be the superstar son, to...save them from their imminent tragedy. And they're gone. The rain keeps pouring on the roof, like the world isn't ending, and Chanyeol's watching the skyline, wondering if this is what it looked like when his parents last saw it, too._
> 
> _“Chanyeol,” Marshall Kwon stands, moving to hold the boy, not quite a man. “If you want, we can put you on leave from the academy. You and Baekhyun can delay your graduation. Take some time off to mourn properly.”_
> 
> _“No,” Chanyeol says immediately. He can't even will himself to cry. It's just a strange emptiness, that the inevitable had come and – and the world is still going on around him, the rain still falling, without them. “The academy is designed to break you, right? To put you through what a kaiju will, without stopping. Well, kaijus kill the people you love. And if I can't finish the academy after losing someone, then maybe I'm not cut out to be a ranger after all.”_

_Let’s go, Chanyeol,_ Jongin says. Chanyeol turns to Jongin, and he’s waiting at the edge of the memory; it’s warmer out there, everything basking in a golden light. Smiling, he wades out, back towards the feeling of Jongin beside him. He doesn’t want to relive that day, not again, not now. It is the past; and nothing he does here will ever change it. It has finally become that Chanyeol has run out of things to say, ways to reinterpret that day, the desperation to understand better why – and how, and what he could have done – and he finally feels the strangest acceptance wash over him as he approaches Jongin.

It’s over, it’s really over. The guidance of the yellow light, the neverending rain, the feeling that maybe, just maybe, he will wake up and be given a second chance – that this nightmare will end – it’s over. Shore Lucky, his god, his idol, finally broken down into pieces; the drift, his fear, his lover, finally heavy around him. The past has gone; no longer an active force flying around him, but rather, the water that pools at his feet, over, done, he wades through it and knows that it will always be there, but he is here. There’s air up here, he can breathe, it’s finally ended.

_And I have a job to do._

He does.

_We’ll always love you…And I, will always love you too…especially now, especially today, and tomorrow too…_

When he feels the warmth envelop him, he knows he made the right choice.

“Good job, I was worried there,” Krystal says. “Stay in alignment. We’re ready to go.”

The two of them move back towards a more neutral area of the drift, and slowly but surely, Jongin’s weight helps pull Chanyeol to a steadiness. When they reach the stable bridge, he smiles.

 _Hey there, partner,_ Chanyeol thinks.

 _Hey you_ , Jongin responds. _I think we did it._

_We did._


End file.
